Auto Hide Products that are Out of Stock in last 90 days

Shopify Plus

Topic summary

Goal: Use Shopify Flow to hide products only after they’ve been out of stock for more than 90 days, allowing preorder before that.

Key constraints:

  • Shopify doesn’t record the date a product/variant goes out of stock; updated_at isn’t suitable for this.
  • Flow currently can’t query by metafields.

Suggested approach:

  • On out-of-stock event, store the date:
    • Prefer tags (e.g., “nostock_MM_DD_YY”) since they’re queryable.
    • Alternatively, define a product metafield (e.g., out_of_stock_date) via Admin, but note it can’t be queried in Flow yet.
  • Use a Flow step like “Get product data” with a tag query (e.g., tag:nostock_12_28_23) to find products whose out-of-stock tag date is 90+ days old.
  • Generate the correct date/tag using Liquid so the query targets the 90-day threshold.

Status: A feasible tagging-based workflow is outlined; implementation details (tagging automation and Liquid date logic) remain to be completed. Discussion remains open.

Summarized with AI on January 8. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hi, i’m trying to customize standard automation of shopify flow to hide out of stock products.

I need to autohide not all products but only the ones that are out of stock after over 90 days, so customers can eventually preorder meanwhile the products is restocked.

I think that a variabile that i can consider is updated_at, but i don’t know how to use it.

Can you help me?

thank you

1 Like
2

Shopify doesn’t store the dates when a product or variant goes out of stock. You could do that by setting a product metafield (you would need to define that metafield first through the Admin, something like a out_of_stock_date). The problem after that is that you cannot yet query by metafields. So you might need to use tags instead (which you can use in a query), setting it to something like “nostock_02_28_24”). Then you can use a “Get product data” query to get products that were expired 90 days ago (using tag:nostock_12_28_23). You’ll need to write some liquid to get the write tag/date.