Anyone else frustrated with new "update" re: Inventory vs. On Hand Quantity?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

Shopify merchants are frustrated by an inventory management update that replaced the “Available” column with “On Hand” in bulk editing views. The “On Hand” quantity represents total physical inventory (Committed + Available + Unavailable), making it difficult for merchants to see at-a-glance what’s actually available for sale.

Key Issues:

  • Bulk editing now only shows “On Hand,” requiring merchants to click into individual products to see “Available” inventory
  • Products with variants display “On Hand” first, cutting off variant names when scrolling to view “Available” quantities
  • Merchants without physical inventory (dropshippers, made-to-order businesses) find “On Hand” meaningless for their workflows
  • The change has caused overselling, incorrect stock displays, and significant time waste
  • Mobile app only shows “On Hand” with no way to view “Available”
  • Technical bugs include: page jumping to top after saving, negative inventory amounts appearing incorrectly, and save buttons disappearing

Shopify’s Response:

  • Initially defended the change, suggesting merchants use “continue selling when out of stock” settings
  • Later re-enabled editing of “Available” quantities and allowed negative inventory
  • Fixed CSV import/export workflows
  • Acknowledged bugs are being investigated but provided no timeline for fixes
  • Stated “On Hand” feature will not be removed despite widespread complaints

Merchant Reactions:
Many are considering switching platforms (WooCommerce, BigCommerce mentioned). Merchants report lost sales, angry customers, staff stress, and hours of additional work managing inventory. The update appears inadequately tested and poorly suited for diverse business models.

Summarized with AI on November 2. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
74

@Shay

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.

variant titles
variant titles1084×1134 61.7 KB

cuts off variant titles
cuts off variant titles1132×1030 49.5 KB

It’s not possible to view both the variant names and the “available” amounts at the same time.

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