Our Partner & Developer boards on the community are moving to a brand new home: the .dev community forums! While you can still access past discussions here, for all your future app and storefront building questions, head over to the new forums.

Inventory control / safety buffer

Inventory control / safety buffer

StickyVinyl
Tourist
11 0 11

 
Hello Shopify Community,
 
For a physical storefront and an online store on Shopify we’re looking to o create a "buffer" or "safety stock" for our online listings. This approach aims to ensure we always have stock available, even in the event of simultaneous online and in-store sales.
 
To explain further, if we have 10 units of a product available, we'd like our Shopify store to only show a portion of that (e.g., 6 units available online), thus keeping a buffer to prevent stockouts from affecting either sales channel.
 
I'm reaching out to the community for insights or advice on how to best implement this strategy within Shopify. Is there a direct way to set up such a buffer stock level for online inventory, or will I need to rely on manual adjustments or third-party apps? If it's the latter, are there specific apps or tools you'd recommend for managing this aspect of inventory control?
Any guidance on how to approach this, experiences with similar setups, or recommendations for apps and tools would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your help and suggestions!
 

Replies 2 (2)

Kalen_Jordan
Shopify Partner
800 38 144

Yeah there's a safety stock field in inventory:

https://www.shopify.com/retail/safety-stock

bala_zorp
Shopify Partner
6 0 0

Instead of just changing the stock level, you could use AI Alerts for Stockouts & Delays to receive a notification when your stock hits your buffer level and if you'd like set up auto resolution process like send a purchase order to your vendor or maybe escalate this matter to someone on your team.