Darft Orders overstep inventory

Deutsch Diskussion Technische Fragen & Antworten

Topic summary

A merchant is preparing for a trade show and plans to use Shopify’s backend “create order” feature to process customer orders on-site. They’ve identified two critical problems:

Key Issues:

  • Products can only be added in increments of 1, not in their actual sale units
  • Inventory levels are only visible once, not updated when adding more units to the cart

Main Concern:
Overselling inventory through draft orders, which would be problematic given their long production times and potential damage to customer credibility.

Proposed Solutions:

  • Enable inventory tracking for all products
  • Use Shopify’s inventory scanner feature to manually check stock levels before adding items
  • Consider switching to Shopify POS Lite instead of draft orders for the event, as it’s designed for popup/in-person sales and would be more efficient than creating individual draft orders for each customer

Status: The discussion remains open with the merchant seeking either interface modifications to prevent overselling or app recommendations as alternatives.

Summarized with AI on November 2. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hi Community,

we are soon going to a big trade show where we planned to accept orders through the Shopify app.

Specifically, in the backend page for orders, we planned to click “create order” and then file the order for the customer.

There are two issues we have with this:

  1. You cannot add product in sale units, only in steps of 1.

  2. You only see inventory once but not when adding more units to the cart.

Because of this we are worried to sell more inventory than we have available.

Since production takes a long time of our items this would be a disaster for our credibility with our customers.

Can anyone help us either to change that interface so that we cannot oversell with draft orders? Or does anyone have a recommendation for an app which can help us here?

Thank you!!

2

Hey, I would say using draft orders for a popup event is quite laborious. What if customers are waiting at your stand to purchase something, and you have to create draft orders for each customer? That will take aaaages… Plus, it is true that with draft orders at such an event, you can oversell. To prevent overselling, ensure that inventory tracking is enabled for all products. You can also use the inventory scanner feature to quickly check inventory levels before adding products to an order.

Why not use Shopify POS Lite instead for such popup Events and be a bit more professional about it?

More on that here. See the hardware here.