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I just discovered that when I view all products > by vendor > bulk edit, the Column options have changed and now the only way to update Inventory is by using the "On Hand Quantity" column? I raised this issue with Support and after a 2 hours chat, here is what I was told:
Shopify: "Regarding our Support team, yes there is an update regarding the Inventory.
There's a new update when it comes to inventory states. We can't edit the "available" section anymore, instead we can edit the "on hand". So on hand state represents = committed + available. This means this is an expected behavior that when you adjust the on hand, the available would too."
Me: Why did they make that update? It will be a huge timesuck for someone like me who runs inventory differently. Can you pass that feedback along to them? I never have anything on hand - I keep no inventory - my inventory tells me what has been purchased so if all I can see when I edit is "On Hand", I won't be able to bulk edit my Inventory I'll have to go into each products (hundreds) to update manually
Shopify: "I do understand that Anna, and yes I will be passing this feedback of yours with our developers"
Me: So, there is nothing they can do? I'm stuck with this "update"?
Shopify: "As of the moment, the only thing you can do is update your available inventory using "on hand".
On hand represents all inventory a merchant physically has at a location. On hand = Committed (to an order) + Available (for sale) + Unavailable (e.g. draft order reservation). With this release, merchants can no longer edit the Available quantity in Admin: the only manually editable quantity will be On hand."
Me: It's a stupid update b/c not everyone manages inventory this way. I have nothing physically in stock. I don't ship anything or fullfil orders through Shopify
Shopify: "My apologies about the update"
Me: On Hand is nothing that correlates to my business and now I'm forced to use it.
Is anyone else having this issue? It's going to create hours more work for me for my store if I have to update every single product manually.
Solved! Go to the solution
This is an accepted solution.
Hi everyone!
Thank you all for the feedback and sharing how this update affects your business. We are assessing everyone's use cases and working to re-enable some of these workflows as soon as possible. We already shipped improvements to the Inventory CSV workflow, as follows:
We have more coming and will return to this thread with updates as soon as they are shipped. In the meantime, continue to share your experience here and rest assured that all your feedback on this is being heard.
I am marking this response as the solution to this thread for now so that other merchants can easily follow along with the updates we are shipping on this.
Shay | Social Care @ Shopify
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This is an accepted solution.
Blair | Shopify
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Hey everyone,
Based on feedback from merchants like yourself, our product team has been hard at work making changes to Shopify’s inventory system. We wanted to highlight a feature that might be of use to many of you!
You now have full control over which quantities you see on your Inventory page, and in what order. This means that if On hand does not make sense for your business, you can now hide it from your inventory page. You can also rearrange your inventory page so that Available is always shown first.
This feature also helps you to create work-flow specific views. For example, if you wanted to create a saved view to inform your reordering decisions, you could show only the Available and Incoming quantities, with a filter for Available < 10 and call it “Low Stock”.
Learn how to do this in our help docs.
Thank you again for all of your feedback!
Hi @Shay are there any updates on giving us the option to go back to the way inventory was accounted for before? This new update is causing a million problems for us, and a ton of others, it seems. It would be great to get a reply from you on this. Shouldn't Shopify's goal be to make things easier on its customers?? We're all very frustrated.
This is an accepted solution.
Hi everyone!
Thank you all for the feedback and sharing how this update affects your business. We are assessing everyone's use cases and working to re-enable some of these workflows as soon as possible. We already shipped improvements to the Inventory CSV workflow, as follows:
We have more coming and will return to this thread with updates as soon as they are shipped. In the meantime, continue to share your experience here and rest assured that all your feedback on this is being heard.
I am marking this response as the solution to this thread for now so that other merchants can easily follow along with the updates we are shipping on this.
Shay | Social Care @ Shopify
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- Was your question answered? Mark it as an Accepted Solution
- To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Shopify Blog
This "solution" does not help me whatsoever. I do not do any csv importing or exporting. I need to have negative inventory for pre-orders. I need to have my inventory (positive or negative) get reduced when someone orders items and not when the items are shipped. Very simple. Your new "system" is so convoluted and does not make any sense for my business.
@Shay are you able to confirm whether a return of direct control over the "Available" field will be implemented in the near future? I am holding off on updating my inventory (and therefore suffering a major slowdown in sales) until I know whether this option will be reinstated. The alternative is too dire to contemplate.
Thanks for the update @Shay . This is certainly progress, but does not get most of us where we need to be. Hopefully it won't be long before the ability to edit available stock will be put back on the dashboard (and not just in a bulk csv edit).
I very much agree! It’s super hard to check my inventory to cross reference with the load of orders that I get and the fact that I can’t change how many are available vs on hand makes it hard to keep track of stock 😞 i wish it returned to how it was before the update
@Shay. Rather than tell us when things are shipped could you maybe brief the community what further rollbacks / updates are being worked on currently and to what timescales. Eg our website is forced offline due to lack of negative inventory values and we are just as much in the dark now
Your update is very much like ...we accept our own solution of doing unspecified things in an unspecified timeframe. I can't applaud that !
@Shay The Committed/On Hand behavior also makes inventory syncing way overly complicated with a Fulfillment Service with "inventory_management: true". Our WMS already tracks inventory with great detail and supports orders from many sources so to get an accurate inventory to show up in Shopify is almost impossible in many situations because it would require knowing about all pending orders in Shopify and/or all other pending orders in the WMS and taking that all into account.
Example:
Say there are 100 units of an item in stock. If one is sold on Shopify the sold inventory (Committed) is deducted from the On Hand as it should be. However, once the Fulfillment Order is submitted and accepted by the WMS, now the "available" reported by the WMS is also reduced so it is effectively deducted a second time by Shopify. If the WMS instead reported "available + allocated + reserved + picked + backordered" (basically everything until it is shipped) then this would work in simple cases and is what were are currently doing, but it has major problems:
1. If there are orders from other sources, these will be added to the Shopify inventory (oversell). We would have to separate Shopify orders from non-Shopify orders so the entire inventory can no longer be summed up so simply, it has to be computed real-time aggregating data from thousands of orders.
2. Some items are actually "virtual" inventory for which we compute an "available" amount in a very complex way based on availability of a combination of other SKUs - this completely throws a wrench in this system since it computes what should be "available" and now we have to know what amount Shopify is going to subtract from it.
3. We support a very complex allocation system that can, among other things, "lock" orders to warehouses so an item can be in-stock in one warehouse but still backordered at the same time. The pre-computed "available" amount takes all of this into account but having to re-do all of this on the fly based on all of the orders in the system and Shopify's orders is again a huge burden and also impossible to do without introducing more race conditions.
I suggest a flag for Fulfillment Service (FS) that determines if the inventory reported should be inclusive of pending orders (On Hand - the current behavior) or exclusive of pending orders (Available - the old behavior). For example, a flag like "fetch_inventory_mode" with "available" or "on_hand" as options to determine the behavior of the numbers received by the "fetch_stock" callback.
With Fulfillment Order (FO) mode there is a very definitive moment at which Shopify knows the FS is aware of the order - that is when the FO "request_status" changes to accepted (The fulfillment service accepted the merchant's fulfillment request). So it makes sense to no longer assume the inventory needs to be subtracted automatically.
Thanks for your consideration. We have many merchants that are very frustrated by inventory syncing issues and it is clear Shopify is trying to make the inventory management more robust but this assumption that everyone wants to (or can feasibly) report On Hand instead of Available was a terrible mistake.
At a bare minimum please return the "committed" amount in the response for the "Retrieves a list of inventory levels" API. This would make it possible to at least have visibility into what number Shopify has on record for the Committed amount without having to fetch every single pending order.
While you are taking into consideration the stated issues, you might want to correct this issue, too. I have the Purchase Order option. I would enter a PO into the system and when I viewed my inventory it would show what was on order. Now when I look at my inventory it does not show what is on order any more. This was an extremely helpful tool in maintaining inventory and why it was taken out I have no idea. Now the fields are unavailable, committed, available and on hand. Maybe it is just me, but I can't imagine any reason why you would need to know what is unavailable.
Thanks for the follow up and for acknowledging some of the problems created by the most recent update. However, the steps you’ve outlined so far do nothing to help with most of our issues and should not be marked as a solution for this topic.
Can you please let us know:
1. When the “available” column will be added back to the “bulk edit products” view. (The “on hand” column as the only option to select for viewing inventory from the bulk edit view is useless. It’s NOT what retailers need to see. We need to be able to quickly see what’s actually in stock (not committed/already sold).
2. When will the issues with not allowing negative inventory amounts be fixed?
Not allowing for negative inventory is impacting a lot of Shopify customers - causing a lot of extra work and messing up our inventory levels. The example I gave before this topic was marked as resolved is still an ongoing problem.
For example, we have 5 tees in stock, sell 5 tees (committed but not yet fulfilled) then notice that 1 item is damaged. So we have 5 orders, 4 items to fulfill those orders. We need to be able to make the inventory -1 until we receive more stock.
With the "on hand" update, there's no way to do that now. The committed and available amounts can not be edited, the on hand amount can not be less than zero.
How is it possible that Shopify didn’t consider the need for negative inventory before pushing through the recent update?
Another major issue regarding inventory with variants -
From the individual product pages, it now only shows "on hand" amounts unless you scroll over to see the "available", "committed", "incoming" amounts. When you scroll over to view the available amount, it cuts off the name of the variants! So if there's a product with lots of variants, it's impossible to keep the variants straight when trying to get a quick view of "available" inventory levels. (Some users on mobile devices have voiced that it's not even an option to scroll over on mobile to view the "available" numbers.)
Please see the example below, a product with numerous variants.
It's not possible to view both the variant names and the "available" amounts at the same time.
I would like to reiterate the issue with pending pickup orders being counted as "On Hand". Some customers take days/weeks/months to pick up their orders and having those items shown as On Hand inventory that is sold and unavailable is extremely confusing.
This is progress but certainly not a solution. This does not help the vast majority of people in this discussion. I really hope more updates are coming as you have stated, as this will be forgotten or buried.
This update is so out of touch with your merchants.
@Shay I'd very much like to restate that we need the Inventory/Available column back as an option in BULK EDIT. When I posted this issue back on 1/31 at some point on Wed, 2/1 the "On Hand" column started reporting the true "Available" numbers and not all ZEROs like it had been. I was SO HAPPY! I was able to bulk edit my inventory before my order went live that week....BUT NOW it's back to being "broken" again....yes, BROKEN...I have no clue what was done on Wednesday, 2/1 to make the On Hand column show true Available items and no idea what was done after that date to revert back to this ridiculous "On Hand" all ZEROs number but please - for the love of all that is pure and simple - give us our Available column back in Bulk Edit. I'm no developer but I can't imagine it's that hard to give bulk edit access to this column.
@Shay We need more timely updates on this thread as many of us have businesses on life support while we await the return of direct control over the 'Available' field. Are you at least able to let us know whether this is in the works or not?
This actually does nothing for people who carry Inventory in their shop and sell online at the same time. With over 1800 different bottles of wine in my shop, I'd say 80% is now not available online even after the fix. We need a way to manually get rid of the "committed" and "on hand" parts of the inventory. 99% of the small biz owners run their inventory with what's available. That's it. Just create a patch to opt out or change it back to how it was and have a section for people to opt in. Unless Shopify wants to credit our accounts for the loss of revenue we occur daily since the "update" was put in place?
Also....when someone of work from home and depend on our inventory to be accurate...it's not. In the last week or so I've ordered wine we already have on the shelf and employees are trying to figure out why we are getting what we are getting. Two weeks I'm at $4K in over spending on wines we already had on the shelf that were not sold out. Have you ever just pull $4K out of the checking account and lost it? That's what's going on right now around the US with this "update"
@Santo_Roman I could not agree more! I waste more time on counting and re-counting my inventory because it changes. I order more stock only to realize I already have it. SO FRUSTRATING!
and now we cannot even talk to support:
" Live chats and Phone callback support is temporarily unavailable"
Hi @Shay this accepted solution has not helped anyone here. We are all asking for the regular available inventory to be returned to its previous form. Our inventory is all screwed up now and we're getting orders for things we don't have. What is taking so long for Shopify to make this right? Y'all are making everything more complicated for no good reason and messing up a bunch of stores in the process.
Solution is unsat. Do the programmers, or those that make decisions, actually have a store?
The Inventory screen used to show Inventory Available, and Incoming based on a created Transfer. No more.
This makes it painstaking to see what inventory you have on hand at a glance in order to re-order inventory. I don't want to have to generate a report every time. I want to click INVENTORY and see everything about inventory on one page - On Hand, Committed, Available, and INCOMING.
Frustrated is an understatement. This is atrocious. I have 10 girls working for me, I have had problems with ALL TEN OF THEM managing this new inventory system. That tells me everything I need to know, Shopify needs to change this STAT.
I've had employees telling customers to drive all the way out to our brick and mortar store because products are in stock when they are not (employees are getting mixed up between on hand and available) This has caused 2 poor reviews online (the only 2 negative we've ever had)
I've had staff delete items from inventory not understanding that the app is showing them "on hand" not "available" This has caused us to spend money unnecessarily on inventory
I've had items not re-ordered on time because there has been confusion between what has actually sold and what has not. This alone has cost me thousands.
Ive had my store for 23 years and I've been through 5 different POS systems with inventory management and this is hands down, no question, the absolute worst update I've ever seen. It's just bizarre to me why Shopify would have done this... I've really thought long and hard about it and as mentioned above, I have a ton of retail and wholesale experience and there, in my opinion, is absolutely no advantage to this new system. It causes confusion, causes dire issues both in store and online and for every other retailer I've discussed this with, it has been a recipe for disaster.
Sadly whilst this may be a great solution for some; it changes nothing for me - i just want to see availability - nothing amazing just plain whats available not whats in hand as i need to know availability today without having to drill down through inventory to see whats commited but not yet fulfilled
Hi there! I seem to be equally frustrated with the inventory update but for a slightly different reason. I get the on-hand and committed columns, and those aren't my problem. I order inventory on an as-needed basis and sometimes multiple times a week. I used to be able to go to the inventory tab and see (on ONE screen) what I have stocked, and what I have incoming, AND how many were committed-(though I don't think committed was the term). Anyway, the way it used to be was perfect, and now it's such a hassle.
Can the committed column be added to the incoming inventory screen? OR add the incoming to the regular inventory page?
So that it would be COMMITTED - AVAILABLE - ON HAND - INCOMING- all on one screen. Or even just COMMITTED - ON HAND - INCOMING. I really need to be able to see it all, and it would make ordering inventory so much easier than the current config. Thank you for your consideration!
Yes Elisat. This is all we need!
Jan.30th this thread has started. I am so tired of reading that nothing has been done to make it work again like it used to work just fine. DEVELOPERS and Co you have been a big disappointment to everyone. NOTHING to be proud of!!!
@Shay is there any updates for this thread please? The last 4 or 5 posts are waiting for a reply.
How is this taking so long and why the sudden silence?
As @SOMFootwear said, this thread started on January 30th!
Hi everyone! Thank you for your continued feedback. At this time I don't have an update on if the order of columns in the inventory view is being changed. Our team continues to review for adjustments and improvements to the merchant experience, I can't confirm right now if that is something on the roadmap.
In regards to the page jumping upon saving inventory changes, that has been reported and our developers are aware of the issue. They are working to resolve that concern.
I'll continue to share updates here as I have them.
Shay | Social Care @ Shopify
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Yes, please post here once the page jumping issue is resolved. I just tried it, and it's still jumping to the top of the page once Save is clicked 😞
"On hand has been introduced to give you a distinction between what’s stocked at a location (On hand) and how much inventory is Available for sale. On hand represents all the inventory you have at a location. This includes the inventory you have Committed to orders, set aside as Unavailable, or Available. Your On hand quantity is the number you’d input after a stock count. You can learn more in our Help Center."
This is even more confusing.. All my inventory is thats on hand is available. And if thats the case why do I have to input stuff in on hand otherwise it says sold out? It just makes no sense adds extra steps and no one has time for this. There are pages of complaints why cant it just be changed back and have the option of using "on hand". Guarantee no one will use it but to spring changes like this on retailers is wrong. Especially when there wasnt even beta testing to see if it was useful AT ALL to ANYONE. (hint its NOT)
Oh my gosh I totally with you. I already got in touch with the 3 times but couldn't get through it.
I so so time consuming and so confusing. It mess up my order last time and now EVERYSINGLE TIME I need to check the quantity available for a product I have to get inside each single one of them! Because on had doesn't mean the real quantity available as they what is committed is also on HAND, I don't understand why on earth they would do that.
I am trying to update my inventory as well and this new update is really bothering me. I makes absolutely no sense! Can we go back to the regular one?
This change is incredibly frustrating. We've now run into a few instances where it seems our previous "in stock" (what is now considered "available") number was changed to "on hand", not taking into consideration what was actually available, so we've oversold several items that we do not actually have available this week.
This change is so anti-helpful. We do not update inventory based on items that have sold and aren't yet shipped - we update what is AVAILABLE. And it's never useful for us to know the "on hand" quantity, but now it's the first thing we see (or the only thing we can see in the Shopify app without several additional clicks).
We need this update rolled back, or at LEAST we need to be given the option to choose in settings which field we see and are able to edit for our own inventory tracking.
It's there a way we can make an official complain about it. Is make no sense it an update that will make us work more to restock. Not to say my invert is a mess there is products that became available when I don't have it in stock. And now I have to email client apologizing as I don't have it
@Janusa Several of us have contact Shopify support trying to explain how terrible the update is for retailers who track inventory and have asked them to change it back or simply add an option to select the "available" instead of defaulting to the useless "on hand".
We've all been told they would "give our feedback to the developers" but nothing further could be done at this time. I was also told by the support person I contacted that there was no way they could give me a follow up or update on this issue either since they have no idea if our feedback will result in any action being taken. All they could do was "give our comments to the developers". So frustrating.
Absolutely awful change. I've been with Shopify 13 years but some of their recent choices have me looking into other options. They're losing touch. This may somehow benefit huge fulfillment ops (though I fail to see how) but for most of us it's a time consuming setback. Shopify, talk to your merchants, the smaller ones that make up the bulk of your customer base.
We’re going to have to start looking into new platforms too. This change makes managing our shop so much more confusing and time consuming. It’s also caused us to oversell a bunch of items that weren’t actually available this week.
Anyone know what else is out there to look into as an alternative to Shopify?
I'm going to first look at Big Commerce. I have no time at the moment, though, because I am scrambling to deal with inventory that I don't have in stock but have oversold thanks to this stupid inventory update.
Same, ugh! I did not need this to deal with right now!!
We’re a subscription box but I think we’re going to look at moving to subbly. I really didn’t want to, but the recent Shopify updates are pushing us out, it’s getting way too confusing.
FLAT OUT THE DUMBEST UPDATE Shopify has added.
I'd like to switch to another company and service.
It has cost me so much headaches and money at our bakery. DUMB AF
I'm still trying to figure out how it's allowing us to oversell all these items. Is it now considering ON HAND as in stock (aka can still be sold)?? So someone buys the last one of something, and we haven't shipped it yet because we don't fulfill orders instantaneously so it's still ON HAND, so then the shop allows another sale of that item even though it's actually not available? I can't tell if that's what is happening or not but whatever is going on is INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING.
Yep we need negative inventory values too!!! So much so we've had to take out store offline until this is resolved or we can find a workaround. All Shopify support can suggest is to upload a CSV file with a negative inventory every time we wish to make a change to a single inventory line item !!
I also don't understand why we can't change the committed value when they are not correct.
We use negative inventory values for pre-orders / backorders where we have no physical stock "on hand" but have confirmed availability.
We hear from Shopify that they didn't think about pre-orders when they made these changes (or presumably drop ship orders, backorders, made-to-order, or non-physical goods sales all of which can create negative inventory values without needing to have a positive amount of "physical goods on hand"). But there still seems to be no intent by Shopify to do anything apart from the usual "raise this with the developers"
Seems all the focus from Shopify now in on making changes for big ticket stores even if it hurts the smaller stores. Since they never even tell us these changes are coming. Awful.
It's so upsetting that Shopify doesn't seem to care about their customers enough to respond here with the steps they are taking to correct all the issues the update created.
Also upsetting that they didn't take into consideration how the changes would impact their customers & didn't let us know about the changes before implementing them so we could have at least been prepared or have a plan in place.
Can Shopify support staff please respond here so we know what's being done about this?
Not allowing a negative inventory amount is absurd.
For example, we have 5 tees in stock, sell 5 tees (committed but not yet fulfilled) then notice that 1 item is damaged. So we have 5 orders, 4 items to fulfill those orders.
We need to be able to make the inventory -1 until we receive more stock.
With the "on hand" update, there's no way to do that now. The committed and available amounts can not be edited, the on hand amount can not be less than zero. WHY???
I think the temporary solution we will use is to have say 1000 "on hold" as the new "zero" so 999 on hold represents
-1 ....but this prevents us from being able to stop orders going through when stock hits 1000 (the new zero) in defined situations where we want it to (ie we can't set "continue selling when out of stock" to "no" on certain lines). So we would have to then recode our website to display "out of stock" and remove the "buy now" button when the on hold hits 1000 in those situations. But this workaround can affect collections of products and other things like "Search".
This is frankly a clumsy workaround ... All because some programmer set stupid rule that "on hold" can't be less than zero.
I think we will go with this as a temp solution. It will take a loooot of programming. And we will only use it while we manage away from Shopify as a provider which will take about 3 months.
Unless Shopify start to communicate such changes with huge implications in advance then I don't see how they can be a reliable partner for small business
This is the worse update ever!!!
Dont understand why they have changed it, they need to change it back or else i will be switching to a different website. I cant work like this at all “on hand” doesnt work for my business, or if they was going to add on hand they should of at least give us the option to edit available also
I got a message this morning after asking if I could change back to the old version of Shopify and was told that Shopify is an "as-is" platform. Basically that I can take it or leave it, end of discussion.
That is an awful response. And insulting. I signed up for it "as is", but they fundamentally changed it! I've been with Shopify for 6 years.
The particularly annoying aspect for the way I work is in the mobile app when clicking on individual products, the default inventory view is now 'On Hand', which I want to know almost never. You can't even see 'Available' unlike on desktop. I want to know what's 'Available' and don't want to have to now do extra clicking to find out what that is....
And to echo others, editing 'Available' should absolutely be an option, not editing 'on hand' which has the same result anyway but potentially shows a different number than what's 'only' available making it a more confusing adjustment....
Just let us edit 'Available' Shopify, there's no way that would be a difficult implementation considering that's how it was until recently. Keep your 'on hand' default supremacy in service of, I guess, catering to 'Shopify Plus' customers and new revenue streams if you must but give us wee little lower plan subscribers (still costing me nearly $600 a month with apps) that actually keep your lights on, the option to change it and work OUR way instead of your non-shop-running programmers' way.
This is literally the worst update in the history of Shopify. I hope they are working on reversing this "on hand" feature, it's completely useless and only causes confusion.
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