Operating raw materials & stock

With write access, a connected assistant can build and maintain your raw materialsRaw materialThe atomic component of a BOM or sub-assembly. Two flavors: a Shopify-linked variant (inventory tracked in Shopify) or a virtual material (DO-side inventory only). Both kinds appear in the same component picker and are consumed identically when a BOM fires — except virtual materials never trigger a Shopify call. Read more → — the components your BOMs and sub-assemblies are made from. It can register materials straight from your Shopify catalog, create purely internal virtual materialsVirtual MaterialA material tracked entirely inside Assemblified — not a Shopify variant. Useful for shop-floor consumables (glue, packaging, labour units) where you need quantity tracking but don't want a Shopify product on your storefront. Read more → , and keep their stock levels accurate. This page explains what that covers.

On this page

• What it takes
• Registering materials from Shopify
• Creating virtual materials
• Editing and removing materials
• Setting virtual stock levels
• Doing it in bulk
• Safety & audit

What it takes

Write access is opt-in. The assistant needs either an API key created with read & write scope or a web-chat connection granted read & write when it was linked. A read-only connection can’t see or use any of the actions below. See API keys and Connect claude.ai or ChatGPT.

Registering materials from Shopify

Most raw materials are real Shopify variants. The assistant can find them in your catalog (see What the assistant can read) and register them as raw materials — one at a time or many at once. Each registration reports whether the material was newly created or already existed and was refreshed, so re-running is safe.

Creating virtual materials

For components that don’t exist as Shopify products — internal parts, packaging, consumables — the assistant can create virtual materialsVirtual MaterialA material tracked entirely inside Assemblified — not a Shopify variant. Useful for shop-floor consumables (glue, packaging, labour units) where you need quantity tracking but don't want a Shopify product on your storefront. Read more → , whose stock Assemblified tracks itself. It can set the product and variant name, unit of measurement, SKU, and an opening stock quantity.

Editing and removing materials

The assistant can update a material’s details and delete materials you no longer need. A material that’s still used by a BOM or sub-assembly is protected — the delete fails for that item with a clear reason, so nothing in active use disappears silently.

Setting virtual stock levels

For virtual materials, the assistant can keep per-location stock accurate:

• Add or subtract a quantity (a delta — “we received 200 more”).
• Set an exact quantity (an absolute count — the safe choice for a stock-take, because repeating it can’t double-count).

Shopify-linked materials keep their stock in Shopify — the assistant reads those live levels but doesn’t change them here.

Note

Real per-location levels for any mix of materials are available to read through the inventory surface, and your Shopify locations are readable so the assistant can resolve which location a level applies to. See What the assistant can read.

Doing it in bulk

The assistant can create many materials and delete many in single calls — registering a hundred Shopify variants, or creating a batch of virtual components, without hundreds of separate requests. Every bulk call returns a per-item result (created / skipped-as-duplicate / failed) and offers a preview mode that validates without writing, so a plan can be checked before it’s committed.

Tip

See Build and stock BOMs from your catalog via the API for the end-to-end flow that ties material registration together with building BOMs.

Safety & audit

Every call the assistant makes is tied to the API key or connection it used, and access can be revoked at any time — see Managing access & security. Write access is scoped to your single store, and the assistant can never reach anything beyond the actions described in this documentation.

See also

• Operating BOMs & sub-assemblies — building and composing finished goods.
• What the assistant can read — the read surface.