Wordpress/Woocommerce - Two products share same stock? - wordpress

Question

I am looking for a way to allow two products to share the same stock/inventory. Everything I have come across suggests using variations but this doesn't work in my case.
This is my current situation. I am selling a unisex t-shirt but would like it to show up in both the mens section and womens section on my store. The tees already have variations in that they are being sold in sizes XS-XL. Ideally, in the mens section the product image would be of a male model wearing the tee and in the womens section the product image would be of a female model wearing the tee. So they're technically two different products but at the end of the day it's all coming from one stock, so I need these two products to share their inventory.
Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

You could technically achieve this by using SQL code and events.
ie,
Create two products that are to share the same stock
Create SQL script that updates the stock level of both products to the lowest amount where there is a mismatch
Create SQL event in database that activates this basic script every 15 minutes.
It's not perfect, and it probably won't work on a shared server (rarely do you have event access on shared services), but it works in theory. You could also do this via cron/php script, but I'm not great at php so, meh.
Here's a similar thing I did for cost of goods sold in my database:
UPDATE wpi1_postmeta as pm
INNER JOIN wpi1_atum_product_data as atum
ON atum.product_id = pm.post_id
SET pm.meta_value = atum.purchase_price
WHERE atum.purchase_price is not NULL
AND atum.purchase_price <> pm.meta_value
AND pm.meta_key = '_woosea_cost_of_good_sold';