How to know when an order is ready to ship (stock is available) without checking every single item?

[TelescopesCan]

We allow "Continue selling when out of stock".  This is something that is common in our business as many items are ordered by us from suppliers only when a customer orders them from us (they can be quite large or expensive or out of stock with suppliers or all of the above).  BUT where it really hurts us is when reviewing orders, new and old, the only way to verify that we have stock and that the order is ready to ship is to open each product from an order in a new tab, one at a time.

This gets old mighty fast!

Just showing the number of in stock items beside the order line items or a coloured dot (red/yellow/green?) for stock levels would save us immense amounts of time and gray hair and give confidence that we're doing the right thing.  It would also give us a nudge where we need to order more of an item if we see it's running low.

If you run into this too, please put in a feature request to up-vote a solution for it (It looks like the process for feature requests is to submit a technical support ticket through the Help).

Any suggestions on how to make this process easier are welcome (I suppose suggested inventory management apps as well, sigh...), but we would love to see it natively in Shopify as it seems like it's a quick win and an obvious improvement to remove a pain point for anyone allowing selling while out of stock, and it would help avoid accidently sending fulfillment notices when the products aren't actually available to ship, which happens from time to time and aren't great optics events with customers.

[TelescopesCan]

Crickets?  Bueller?

I can't imagine that we're the only ones with this issue.

I guess there's no solution for it.

Shopify, isn't it something that we would expect in the system, that we would be somehow warned if we're fulfilling an item that we don't have inventory for? 

That seems awfully basic to me.

[StevenF1]

Hi guys. I see these comments from almost two years ago. Did you ever solve this problem? We have the exact same issue. We need to sort our unfilled orders to determine which are fulfillable - meaning we have inventory on hand to meet that order. Just curious if you are still laboring with this issue. I have looked for days to find an app to solve this and the only solutions thus far are expensive Order Management Systems.

Thanks.

[TelescopesCan]

Sadly, no, in theory Shopify Plus could allow you to script something to check all the orders or Arigato could have a workflow, though it's complicated enough that we haven't been able to make one work yet.
We have Arigato add a tag to orders with a back-ordered part# and supplier name so that we can at least see the part number in the open orders view, that helps a bit.

[StevenF1]

Thank you.

I will keep looking and let you know if I learn of anything interesting.

Good luck.

[LeisureMusic]

Following this! Exact same user case with me

[DavidDB1]

Hi,

iPacky has a module called Order availability that might solve your problem.

https://ipacky.com/order-availability/

[MischaDbd]

Hi there! We have exactly the same issue. We use „continue selling“ on more than 2k products with more than 400 orders per months. In the past, we used an app called „Shippable“ which automatically tagged orders that are ready to ship. However, two days ago either Shopify or the publisher of the app suddenly removed it from the App Store and from our system. We tried several other tagging apps and no other one is able to tag orders that are ready to fulfill. We also tried Shopify Flow -  there is a trigger called „Ready to fulfill“. But this doesn’t work neither… the trigger fires even though the order hasn’t enough stock to be shipped. We are really in a bad situation and have no idea how we shall do shipping today. If anybody out there has any idea that could help us, we would really appreciate it. Best, Mischa

[DavidDB1]

Hi,

iPacky has a module called Order availability that might solve your problem.

https://ipacky.com/order-availability/

[Siejek]

Hi! We got the same problem! We got over 5k products on "continue selling when out of stock" and this is getting out of hand because we need to check every order manualy to see if we can fullfil it from our stock.

Any solutions?

[Summer]

Hey, @Siejek! 

Thanks for chiming in and sharing your need for the feature. There's no native solution to this as of yet, so I submitted a feature request to our development team on behalf of everyone. If we implement this feature in the future, we'll post it on our changelog. 

[Siejek]

Hey, @Summer!

Any news regarding this feature? 

Simple chart or colour marker near the ordered items would be amazingly helpful to see if we have them in stock 😉

Thanks and cheers! 🐻

[MischaDbd · Accepted solution]

We meanwhile use Ablestar Automatic Order Tags, which works perfectly for us. Just google for their solution and you will find exactly this use case. 

[TelescopesCan]

Thank you!! This has been a thorn in our side for years, installed it and it works pretty well.  
Now if we can just get Shipstation and Shopify to properly update orders between them when orders change we’ll be golden 😁.  The app has found a ton of unfulfilled orders in Shopify that were shipped according to shipstation, always on orders with line item updates.  More digging required…

[DavidDB1]

The feature called Order availability in iPacky is much more complete, and takes into considerations changes that have happened with orders to correctly calculate which orders can be completely fulfilled or partially fulfilled.

You can even ignore orders manually, or by tags to recalculate availability.

https://ipacky.com/order-availability/

[bala_zorp]

You can set up a process using our Shopify App - AI Alerts & Auto-Resolution
You can set up a flow, wherein whenever you receive a customer order, verify it with your inventory levels & whenever theirs an issue set up a Slack notification or maybe send a purchase order to your vendor.