Set Continue Selling when Out Of Stock for all my products.

[Oz_Barron]

I have a shop with lots of products. They sync from POSIM, my POS. I also do a lot of special orders, many of them come in quickly, so I'd like to set all my products so they can be sold, even if out of stock. I don't see any way to do this in Shopify. Does anyone know of a solution? I want this to be the default for any new items I add. Thanks so much!

[Miles · Accepted solution]

Hi, @Oz_Barron!

I'm Miles from the Social Care team at Shopify.

At this stage, there is no option to allow overselling as a default setting, however, you are absolutely able to select this option for new and existing products.

For New Products
When creating your product, under inventory, ensure "Track Inventory" is ticked. This is generally ticked by default. Underneath that checkbox, you'll see another option to "Continue selling when out of stock". Once this is ticked, the product will be available for overselling when out of stock.

Bulk Updates for Existing Products
For existing products, you're able to edit them in bulk, so you can make the change once for all existing products. To allow overselling for these products, follow these steps:

1. Go to Products > All Products
2. Select all products.
3. Click "Edit products".
4. Once the spreadsheet opens, click "Add fields" and select "Continue selling when out of stock".
5. Tick the checkboxes for all products you'd like to continue selling when sold out.

We have a great guide around bulk editing that might be useful for you. If you'd like to import or update via products via a CSV, you can also check out this guide.

Have a great day!

[Oz_Barron]

Thanks Miles. It's much appreciated. Allow me to request that as an option. Or by collection, or some other manner.

[Miles]

Hey, @Oz_Barron!

I can absolutely pass on this feedback to our product team for you. It's a great idea to have this is a default option, or, as you suggested, being able to edit specific collections to oversell.

Thanks again for reaching out!

[Oz_Barron]

For those following along, being able to edit these in bulk has worked great.

[jessespruijt]

Hi Miles, Shopify, would also really like to request this option! 

[saudpds]

Hello Miles, 

Late to the party, as this is 4.5 years later, but I am still not seeing a default option for "Continue selling when out of stock". What is the development status on this? 

[ThePaws]

Totally effective and good control with this solution. Thank you Miles.

[AidarA]

It's a good idea if you have ten products, but checking the boxes of several hundreds of them... It's misleading to even call this operation "bulk" in a very technical sense. Because it definitely isn't. 

[SuzanneOddy1]

I agree. It's terribly time consuming. It's effectively a manual operation. 

[Towbars]

I total agree, I have of 2000 products. I can't be ticking them one at time. There must be a better app out there.

[valuebeltsplus]

There was a previous method of marking each listing in bulk on the Products page of marking all individual listings with one click "continue selling when out of stock" ........but is no longer available for some strange reason. Marking each inventory is cumbersome, time consuming and ridiculous. Service to Shopify members continues to deteriorate across the board, especially with those of us on the old original plan......

[unamusedtexan]

You can do this by checking the tick mark, then select the larger "excel" box that the checkmark is in. You'll see a little blue square on the bottom right corner of the box light up - just click, hold and drag it down the entire column and all of the subsequent boxes below will also be checked off. Basically, the bulk edit tool works similar to excel/sheets.

[connektiv8]

Have you ever tried doing this with thousands of products? Really not practical and realistically, why not have a tickbox for "Select all" or "Ctrl-A" like just about every other application in the world. Basically Shopify is selling half a product offering as this is just sheer lazy programming. How the hell do they have so many customers? I guess it's not due to features, much like not being able to turn on things like Infinite scrolling by default. These kinds of things are what I'd consider "basic functionality" in a modern shopping cart app...

Don't get me wrong, there's some great functionality in Shopify, though I'm a pretty hard marker when it comes to product offerings.

Any market survey would put those two things up as basic requirements, and also the facility to add/remove columns from the default products screen, to be able to select all and bulk edit what you selected by a "copy down" functionality where anything ticked as selected becomes the same value as that which you change for one of the fields... Really not rocket science and it would make Shopify customers sooooo much happier instead of them wasting their time trying to manually wrangle their data.

Same with product imports and being able to upload a spreadsheet, get the fields read, map them one to one to matching fields in Shopify, be able to preview all the records, then import. All of this kind of functionality has been around since forever and really isn't that difficult to write... again, it would make things so much more user-friend and easier to use.

[StefanB]

You can pull and drag the tick box from the bottom right like excel and scroll. Definitely speeds up the process, I did 900 products in 30 seconds. 

 

[Karlien]

Good day,

I hope you can assist me. This solution works temporarily on one of my products (on the rest it works fine). I set the product to continue selling when out of stock, only when I have a look at it after a hour or so the product shows as Out of stock on the site again. I then make the same change, save it again and before you know it the product again shows as out of stock. Can you please advise why this is happening? As mentioned several of my other products are marked the same and they do not default to Sold Out?

Kind Regards

Karlien

[stouchette]

I actually have been experiencing the same thing as Karlien in our staging instance where I set an item to continue to sell when out of stock. I come back shortly after and its unchecked. I did it  the bulk update the variants, we as well as manually from the variants. Trying to work on setting up  to take Pre-orders. I am on my 7th app since most are not well thought out or are missing key components or don't work. We are about to just write our own custom app for it.

[Karlien]

Hello Stouchette,

Has anyone been able to assist you with this, unfortunately shopify community or support has not assisted me with feedback on why this is or how I can fix it ? I am still for some unclarified reason experiencing the out of stock on some products? 

Kind Regards

Karlien

[stouchette]

Hi, The weird thing was that was just in our staging store for some reason. It might have had something to do with all the apps I added and removed, and some where still live in that instance. Some apps don't play well with others, and cause more problems than they are ever worth. I ended up skipping the apps since I was so frustrated with them either not installing right and working, or they where buggy or missing key components I expected. So I ended up using Accentuate to create 2 fields one for our Expected Ship Date and one for the Qty to Presell. I then import a full list of those two fields every 1-3 days or so to keep them updated. Then I also built into our Shopify product import to set the oversell to deny or continue. I also started writing some code to set the oversell field to deny or continue to the API so we don't have to rely on a manual product feed update from our listers. I just need to log on my end when items are added or removed from open POs from our POS, then trigger the deny or continue via API. We upload a full product feed to Shopify every week or so, so that would turn on or off any oversells. The theme code we set it up so that if the product was set in Shopify to oversell, then it will display the Accentuate field that shows the Estimated Ship Date. Haven't gotten around to limiting the amount they can add to cart to be the Qty in the other Accentuate field. But I assume that won't really be an issue since most sales are just for qty=1.

[DanielleC]

How do I set items to "Sell When Out of Stock" by CSV? I can't seem to find details of this online. Thank you!

[Ablestar_Daniel]

Hi Danielle,

The 'Sell When out of stock' option is labelled 'Variant Inventory Policy' in the Shopify product CSV. It has two options:

• deny - Don't continue selling products when out of stock
• continue - Continue selling products when out of stock

To update the products with a CSV you can do the following:

1. Export your product data from the Shopify admin
2. Open up the spreadsheet and delete all the columns except the following:
   Handle
   Title
   Option1 Value
   Option2 Value
   Option3 Value
   Variant Inventory Policy
3. Fill the 'Variant Inventory Policy' policy column with the word 'continue'

Your spreadsheet should look something like this:

Once you have the spreadsheet formatted, re-upload it to the Shopify admin making sure to select the 'Overwrite products with matching handles' option.

If you update the products this way I'd recommend doing a test with 1-2 products first. You can't see which products where modified and there's no easy way to undo the changes so it's better to do a few and check them manually to make sure nothing's been deleted or duplicated.

Another option to bulk update the 'allow overselling' option is to use an app like our Ablestar Bulk Product Editor. With the app you can preview and undo changes and you don't need to mess around with a spreadsheet unless you want to. Within the app the steps are pretty simple, first you filter for the products you want to edit:

And then you configure the field(s) to edit:

Let me know if you have any issues getting the CSV method to work or other questions about updating data in bulk. Happy to help,

Daniel 

[sibouss]

I am having an issue with the "continue selling when out of stock" option. I am using the DSers dropshipping app which syncs all my products to my store. The app has a feature which automatically keep track of price updates from my supplier and reflects the changes on my shop if any are made. It seems like everytime an update is made the "continue selling when out of stock"  option gets turned off and the products no longer become available on my storefront.

Is there a way to keep the ""continue selling when out of stock"  option constant or automatically update if ever turned off?

[Summer]

Hey, @sibouss! I'm sorry to hear about the issue you're experiencing. While there's no way to automatically toggle the Continue selling when out of stock setting in your admin, I suggest consulting DSers regarding the issue. They may be able to tweak the settings on their end and exclude the Continue selling when out of stock setting when making updates! You can contact DSers by clicking Get support on this page. 

[AlyssaCo-op]

Hi there!

This is a great option, although I'd love my customers to KNOW that this is a backorder and the chances that the get the item is slim. Is there a way to communicate that? Right now it just says "Available Now!" which is not technically correct. 

[megansays]

Yes, came here searching for a solution to this.  It seems essential to me that if a customer is ordering something not currently in stock, they be able to SEE that before they place an order because it may affect their decision making.

[EllyGann1]

Hi, I'm having a slightly different issue where my stock is over-selling, even though all the fields are set up to not let this happen, I've also followed this step by step and all the filters were correct so we're not sure what's wrong; 

My shopify site is 'over selling' products. I have gone through the step-by-step process below and it wasn't set up to oversell; Go to Products > All Products.
Select all products.
Click "Edit products".
Once the spreadsheet opens, click "Add fields" and select "Continue selling when out of stock".
Tick the checkboxes for all products you'd like to continue selling when sold out.

Please could someone get in touch directly as it's effecting the customer service for our brand. 

Thanks, 

Elly

[stouchette]

Can you share a screen short of the admin for the product and a sample URL
of the item on the website? Do you have any apps/code that could be
altering showing items or allowing the oversell?

If you have in shopify an item set to not oversell (deny), then I am not
sure how the item would still be for sale unless you have some other
customization.

I just have code on my end when I see that we sold the last one of a
style/product, then I use the Shopify API to set the item as out of stock.
Then if we get some back in, it shows up in our daily manual product feed
import for edited items which then publishes the item. For oversell, we do
the same where our product import controls it and while the feed is created
it checks our POS if we have an open PO, and also subtracts any open orders
in Shopify so we don't oversell. Once they are all committed, we hit the
Shopify product API to turn off the oversell. We also use Accentuate to
import in the dates for each variant of when the item should ship so we can
display that as the user picks various sizes on our site.

[MORIAH]

Elly,

Did you ever find a fix for this? We're experiencing the same issue where we tell it not to sell when out of stock and it continues to change. Shopify support has looked into it, but they couldn't find anything. 

Thanks! 

Moriah

[stouchette]

I just use the API and turn it on and off as needed, and have a job that
monitors the need on our end.

[DeltaSwankyGirl]

Did you ever find out why this is happening and how did you fix it?

[valuebeltsplus]

There was a previous method of marking each listing in bulk on the Products page of marking all individual listings with one click "continue selling when out of stock" ........but is no longer available for some strange reason. Marking each inventory is cumbersome, time consuming and ridiculous. Service to Shopify members continues to deteriorate across the board, especially with those of us on the old original plan......