Fulfillable Inventory Removes ALL Item Qty if Less than in Stock

[ans_store]

Hello, looking for some help/suggestions here.

The new fulfillable inventory feature is an absolute lifesaver for me, managing 2 separate warehouses with different shipping zones and perishable, frozen product while tracking expiration dates on all product accurately. Now I can remove an absurd and flawed geolocator feature that shows customers in different areas a different version of the same product. Lots of problems with that.

Here is the issue, when a customer proceeds to checkout, until the shipping address is entered, the store does not retrieve target warehouse stock count. IF a customer has qty 9 of item in cart, enters shipping address, and the warehouse that will fulfill the order only has 8 in stock, instead of removing 1 item from the cart and letting customer proceed, all 9 are removed and the customer is shown a popup saying "item out of stock". I don't believe they will then continually reduce qty until it can be fulfilled, nor would they know to do so.

Is there an already in place feature that I'm missing or is this simply an error in the new Fulfillable Inventory feature that will hopefully be fixed in the future?

Looking for help or suggestions, first community question from a longtime lurker here.

Thanks!

[SymmetryMike]

Hey Ans_store!

You should be able to set the desired rules for your fulfillable inventory. Check in your settings to see if you're set to "Sell from all locations to all shipping zones"

Also you can check order routing rules and see what rules you have prioritized. You might have "Stay within the destination market" set to high and it fully restricts buyers from having inventory fulfilled from a location outside their zone.

Cheers,

Mike

[ans_store]

I appreciate the quick reply!

Perhaps my wording was confusing. I do not plan to/cannot fulfill each order from all locations. Each fulfillment center has a separate shipping zone within the US and cannot ship to the other fulfillment center's zone. The restrictions are due to time in transit/dry ice shipping frozen product and the reduced UPS cost of isolating the shipping zones. Additionally, as far as I know since the 2 shipping zones are within the US, they cannot be considered separate markets. 

The issue arises if:

- Global inventory is 10 (warehouse 1 has 6 / warehouse 2 has 4)

- Customer adds 5 to cart and proceeds to checkout (fulfillable inventory does not check individual warehouse until customer enters address)

- Customer enters shipping address served by warehouse 2 

- Fulfillable inventory "checks order" and pop-up says "items out of stock" return to cart

- All 5 items removed from cart and customer is not aware that 4 were available to them

Ideally, I'm looking for a solution like = Sorry not all the items in stock, qty 1 removed, now the customer can checkout knowing that 4 are available to purchase.

I'm hoping I described the problem more accurately this time.

Thanks

[SymmetryMike]

Hey Ans!

Ah thank you for the clarification, I definitely misunderstood the problem and the desired output! 

I think you've definitely reached a limit on the logic that can be build with Shopify's out of the box settings. You're bang on that Shopify only has the information needed once the customer enters information within the checkout. The only way to create a execute logic within the checkout is to use Shopify Functions. Or an app that's pre-built using Shopify Functions (I took a brief look at the app store, but didn't see anything jump out at me that would work in this case).

In my head you'd have a Shopify function that takes a look at the inventory and the customers address and puts up an error message OR automatically reduces the quantity of the products in the cart and alerts the customer.

Keep in mind you'd need Shopify Plus to execute on the above. Hope that helps and let me know if you have any other questions!

Cheers!

[Imogen]

Hey there, @ans_store! Thanks for taking the time to reach out to the Shopify Community with your situation and feedback here! A big thank you to @SymmetryMike as well for lending a hand!

@SymmetryMike is correct - you've definitely reached a limit on the 'logic' that Shopify is using to check for these inventory levels, and notify the customer that the order can't be completed. It looks like the modal that loads for the customer is relatively basic and doesn't provide an option to outline a specific 'cause' for why the products were removed from the cart. With that being said, you can actually change the wording of this modal using the 'Theme Content' Editing Tool so that the wording shown better outlines the potential cause of the issue! I often find that this tool comes in handy in situations like these, so I hope you find my reply helpful!

• First, login to your Admin, and go to 'Online Store > Themes'
• From there, click the three dots (...) next to 'customize', and select 'edit default theme content'.
  
• From there, the editing tool will load! In the filter bar, start typing in the wording for the message that your customers see when the product is being removed from their cart. For this modal it's 'some items are no longer available and have been removed from your cart'. Additionally, select the 'Checkout and System' option from the header bar.
  
  
• From there, you will be presented with the default content area where this wording is housed for the modal. You can edit the text here to read however you like! For example, you could write something like 'your cart contains more product than what we have in stock. Please reduce your quantity and try again.' This is just an example!
  
  

Of course, this is not a solution, but more so a different way to alert your customers of the potential cause. I'm happy to pass along this thread and your feedback to our Developers, however! You provide a very good use case as to why having more intelligent messaging here that reacts to specific inventory levels is helpful for your business! I can't promise what the outcome of sharing this feedback will be, but you can trust that folks will be made aware of this internally!
 

[RCol]

Hi @ans_store, I'm so happy to hear that the Fulfillable Inventory feature is solving problems for you! I happened upon your comment today and wanted to jump in with a response.

The behaviour you've noticed where checkout removes the product from the cart entirely, rather than reducing the quantity, is a known issue that our team is working on. The potential solution the @Imogen laid out is a great workaround, but rest assured that the team is actively working on this and a proper fix is coming soon.

Feel free to reach out if you have any other questions!