Thank you everyone for your feedback! We are sorry to hear this update has caused concerns and we appreciate you bringing it to our attention. We want to take a chance to clear up some confusion around the new inventory states.
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.
If you don’t keep physical inventory
You should set your On hand quantity to 0 and check the “continue selling when out of stock” checkbox for that item.
As orders come in, unfulfilled items will be tracked under the Committed inventory state. Click the Committed quantity for a product from your inventory list to see a list of relevant orders.
The Available quantity will be decreased accordingly to match the number of Committed items. Items will continue to be sold while the “continue selling when out of stock” box is checked.
If you use negative inventory as a prompt to take action
You should set your On hand quantity to 0 and check the “continue selling when out of stock” checkbox for that item.
As orders come in, unfulfilled items will be tracked under the Committed inventory state. Click the Committed quantity for a product from your inventory page to see a list of orders contributing to the Committed value.
The Available quantity will be decreased accordingly to match the number of Committed items. Just as before, you can use this state as an indicator to take action. Items will continue to be sold while the “continue selling when out of stock” box is checked.
If you want some more in-depth information about which items have been sold and in what quantity, you can use one of the following methods:
- Review your unfulfilled orders on the Orders page. From here, you can fulfill orders to ensure that your inventory tracking stays up to date.
- Navigate to Analytics > Reports and look at “Product Sell Through Rate” to see the quantity of individual items sold across a period of time
- If you are on the Shopify plan or higher, navigate to Analytics > Reports and look at “Sales by product variant SKU”. This report tells you how many orders there were for each product in the report’s timeframe. This will be especially helpful if you make products on-demand.
Items that are committed to unfulfilled orders (pre-orders, pick-up order, orders that require shipping, etc) will be taken out of the Available state and moved to the Committed state. This is because these products are no longer available for a sale and thus should not be visible on your storefront. This behavior has not changed since the inventory update, so you can keep using your current workflows!
As always, we welcome your feedback so please don’t hesitate to continue sharing how this change impacts your business. If the explanations outlined above do not suit your specific business workflows, don’t hesitate to contact Shopify Support so we can work with you to find a suitable solution.