Does Shopify track inventory, and how do I check it?

Does Shopify track inventory?

Yes. Once Track quantity is switched on for a product or variant, Shopify inventory tracking keeps count of its stock, and you can see it on the Inventory page of your admin. Shopify records every adjustment, so you can see when and why a quantity changed. It also has Inventory reports, and it lets you import and export inventory quantities using a CSV file.

How does Shopify inventory tracking work?

The Inventory page shows these quantities for each item.

• Available is the quantity available for sale.
• On hand is the total physical inventory at the location.
• Committed is the quantity reserved for orders.
• Unavailable is on hand but not available for sale.

By default, customers cannot buy an item until you add more stock. There is one setting to watch. Continue selling when out of stock, in the Inventory section of a product or variant, lets you sell items that have zero or negative inventory. If you use it, customers can still buy items at zero or negative inventory.

How do I check inventory on Shopify?

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Products, then Inventory.
2. Use Sort by and choose Available, with the lowest quantities first.
3. If you would rather filter, the search bar has filters that include Available and On hand, and you can combine them.
4. Click Save as, give the search a name, then click Save view. Saved views appear as tabs, so next time it is one click.

How do I see which products are out of stock in Shopify?

Use the sorted Inventory page above and look at the top of the list. The Products page also has a Sort by menu with an Inventory option, ascending or descending. When you want to filter by stock, use the Inventory page.

How do I pull an inventory report from Shopify?

In your admin, go to Analytics, then Reports, and set the Category filter to Inventory. These reports are useful for stock questions.

• Inventory sold daily by product shows the average number of items sold per day for each variant.
• Inventory remaining per product estimates how many days your tracked inventory will last, based on recent sales rates.
• Month-end inventory snapshot shows the quantity of each variant in stock at the end of each month.
• Inventory adjustment changes lists every adjustment in a period, including orders, manual edits and changes made by apps.

A fast seller at zero matters more than a slow seller at zero, and the same numbers help you work out what a stockout costs you.

How do I find out how long a product was out of stock?

The reports above show sales rates, month-end stock and a list of adjustments. To work out how long one product was out of stock, you can read its adjustments for the period alongside your own notes and see when its stock reached zero and when it came back. That is manageable for a few products and slow for many.

How do I get told when something sells out?

Checking a page every morning works until the morning you forget. Shopify Flow is Shopify's own free automation app, available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans, and you install it from the Shopify App Store. A workflow in Flow is made of a trigger, conditions and actions.

• The Product variant out of stock trigger starts a workflow when a variant goes from 1 or more to 0 or less. The product needs Inventory tracked switched on.
• The Send internal email action sends an email from your sender email address. Shopify says it is best used for staff, and you can separate several addresses with commas.

Prefer Slack? The step by step is in how to connect Shopify to Slack for stock alerts.

When does checking by hand stop being practical?

If you want to know how long each product has been out, and keep a history you can look back over, doing that by hand means writing down the list every day.

That is the job Stock Monitor is built for. It takes a nightly record of stock for each variant, shows which products are out of stock and for how many days, and keeps each product's history (see the products list and product history). It can also send the out of stock list by email or to Slack every day (see the daily email report). It covers active, published products with inventory tracking turned on, and you choose whether a product with several variants counts as out of stock when all of them are out or when any one is (see how stock status is worked out).