How to reserve stock for our subscribers? Is that even possible?

[north1]

Since we have habitual stock outages, we would like to know how we can reserve stock for our subscribers (we are using the Super Subscription app). We already contacted the app team and they told us that "as of July this year, Shopify updated how they handle out-of-stock subscriptions, and it is no longer possible to reserve stock directly within our app".

To clarify, we are looking for a way to reserve the necessary units to, for example, fulfill all subscriptions for the next 3 months. These units would only be available for filling our subscribers orders and not for one-time purchases nor new subscriptions.

How can we achieve this?

Thank you!

[bundler-marko]

Hi @north1 ,

Unfortunately, I myself do not know how to achieve this, however after browsing Shopify community I have found a merchant with the opposite issue. https://community.shopify.com/c/payments-shipping-and/subscription-stock/m-p/2880169

You could try asking them how they have achieved reserving stock for subscription orders 🙂

[JoesIdeas]

I think the way you'd do it is to limit purchases on the website if stock falls below a certain level.

Maybe something like this:

- Get all subscriptions for next 3 months and calculate inventory for the product

- In your theme code, put a condition to hide the add to cart button if stock is below that level

Here's an example for a product that has 1 variant, and 150 inventory needed to fill your subscription orders:

{% assign threshold = 150 %}
{% if product.variants.first.inventory_quantity > threshold %}
Add to cart normal code here
{% else %}
Display an out of stock or preorder message
{% endif %}

Manual solution: Add the theme code like above example and update the threshold on a regular basis (daily, weekly, etc).

Automated solution: You can use an app to do a daily task to automatically calculate inventory projections and make adjustments as necessary. If you can't find an existing solution, reach out to Product Automator, it does similar things and is customizable, so probably can provide a solution.