How to prevent overselling products with an app?

[HannahBAGP]

We are looking for an app that helps us from overselling products. We are having two issues currently with overselling, the first being on drop days, certain items will sell very fast and if two people checkout at the exact same time, shopify is letting the product oversell even when it is supposed to stop when it hits 0. Our other issue is just human error, shopify may show we had a product for sale when it was not physically on the shelf for various reasons. We are looking for a “buffer” solution to let us choose a inventory quantity to stop selling at. For example once a product has only 2 left, we would want our website to say 0 until we reactivated those leftover quantities after checking inventory.

[andyglade]

can’t you simply enter your inventory as 2 less than you really have?

[guest4]

Take a look at the Shopify Flow app (developed by Shopify). It may allow you to set a product to out of stock if the inventory level meets a certain threshold. If not Zapier may allow you to configure something similar. If not then someone may be able to develop a private app that does the same thing.

[germansunbr8]

Have you found a solution to this issue? Please let me know as we are facing the same and have yet to find a solution!

[guest4]

You may want to give this some consideration: https://www.hotwax.co/blog/reduce-overselling-on-shopify-by-using-inventory-thresholds.

[Tahar]

Hi Hannah,

There are a few alternatives you can go with:

• Always record your stock levels minus what you have as a buffer. This might mislead your employees but you can easily manage this by documenting your workflow. This is harder to achieve if your products have different buffer levels
• You could maybe use an excel file that holds your buffer values for each variant. You could then use this file to generate stocktake files on the fly to update your inventory in bulk
• Use an inventory management app that has support for buffer stock. This is likely better than the option above but is going to be more expensive. 
  
  

I hope this helps. 

Tahar

CEO - Stock&Buy

Inventory management simplified 

www.stockandbuy.com