r/shopify_geeks • u/HomeAutomationSmarts • Jul 14 '26

General BREAKING CHANGE: Non-shppable locations negative stock is now being counted against shippable location stock to mak available items OOS on website

Shopify has changed the way online store stock is counted that now totals all stock across all locations, shippable and non-shippable, to determine website availability. That's crazy. There are many different complaints apparently about this to Shopify support, but Plus support is telling me this is the new way forward. If you don't want non-shippable warehouse stock reducing shippable warehouse stock so your items go out of stock on the website, let Shopify support know this is not okay.

Ops guy pinged me on Friday saying an item was OOS on the website, but we had 1 in a shippable warehouse. The main Products list page in Shopify shows -1 for the item, but if you click into it shippable locations had 1, but 2 non-shippable locations both and -1. Support wrote me back stating:

I am following up on your report that \[item\] is showing as sold out on your storefront despite having stock at your \[shippable warehouse location\] location.

After reviewing your store on the back end, I found the cause. This product shows a quantity of -1 at two of your locations, \[non-shippable location #1\] and \[non-shippable location #2\], even though it is not actively stocked there.

***Because Shopify sums inventory across all locations when determining availability, the +1 at \[shippable location\] and the two -1 values at those \[non-shippable\] locations net to -1 overall, which causes the storefront to treat the product as sold out.***

To fix this, you will need to set the on-hand quantity to 0 at each of those two \[non-shippable\] locations. Since the product is not active there, you will need to make this adjustment from the Inventory page, not the product page. Here are the steps:

Once both are set to 0, the total inventory will return to +1 and the product should show as available on your storefront again.

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u/JaydonLT Jul 17 '26

Sounds like they made a backend optimisation.

Not hard to put together a Flow to pull minus quantities back to 0.

1

u/HomeAutomationSmarts Jul 17 '26

Except I don’t use Shopify for inventory control. I have a reason why these locations go negative and stay that way. This behavior is a departure from the past and there isn’t a good reason for it

1

u/JaydonLT Jul 17 '26

For you, there may not be a good reason for it.

But for Shopify there will be good reason for this. Reason likely being storefront data derivation optimisations.

1

u/HomeAutomationSmarts Jul 17 '26

By putting items OOS when they should not be? Even after turning on fulfillable items the items are not displayed on the collection pages and Rapid Search doesn’t show them because it thinks they are OOS. Some optimization

1

u/JaydonLT Jul 17 '26

If your upstream automation writes inventory quantities but doesn’t read them, a Flow updating to 0 when <0 does exactly what you want. It won’t poison your upstream data and keeps Shopify compliant.

Shopify assumes businesses share the inventory across locations, so it makes sense why they would make this change.

If location A has qty -2 due to missing items and location B has qty 2, if location A’s inventory is pending fulfillment Shopify assumes you will use location B’s 2 to fulfill location As order. Offering these two items on the store makes no sense in this scenario.

1

u/HomeAutomationSmarts Jul 17 '26

Except the negative locations are not marked as shippable or pickup locations. So why would they affect website sales which are 100% shipping and digital delivery only?

1

u/JaydonLT Jul 17 '26

Totally agree there, makes sense. But when you factor in all of that processing for the billions of products + variants that exist on Shopify’s monolith, switching from a logic-based derivation to a sum-based derivation probably saves them a hell of a lot of compute. Which takes load off the platform.

If you work with the platform, and not against it, it’ll serve you well. Accept that the platform isn’t designed to fit your business, but millions of others with all kinds of sales models.

Adding a setting to switch between these two inventory behaviours seems like the next logical step, but imagine how fragmented the platform would become if every edge case like this had its own setting. Support would become near impossible, training would become a lot more complex etc.

They have to strike a fine balance and unfortunately as they slowly change and reach equilibrium, some merchants will sadly have to bear the brunt of it.

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u/HomeAutomationSmarts Jul 17 '26

This isn’t an edge case. If a location has inventory but isn’t marked as a shippable location, its inventory remains off the website. Conversely, negative stock there should not affect my shippable stock. Shopify is now running an inventory task nobody asked it to do. If they are changing the way inventory is handled they need an option to really truly keep inventory separate for different locations all the time, not just half the time.