Display inventory locations with stock left there

Retired Boards Appdev Store Design
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Topic summary

Goal: Show per-location inventory (with counts) on product pages to inform shipping times (1–2 days if local stock; 10–14 days if shipped from foreign warehouse). Current workaround uses product metafields, but it’s manual and not dynamic.

Feasibility update: Not natively possible on the storefront. Inventory counts are only accessible via Shopify’s Admin API (backend-only, requires an admin token). Calling the Admin API directly from the storefront is insecure, as it would expose the token and allow unauthorized queries.

Suggested approach (without third‑party apps):

  • Build a custom backend service that periodically syncs all variant inventory (including per location) from Shopify into your own database.
  • Expose a secure REST API from that service for the storefront to query and display live counts for the selected variant/location.
  • Requires a cloud host and scheduled syncing.

Outcome/Status: No built-in Shopify 2.0 solution; a custom middleware sync + API is the recommended workaround. Thread remains open without a native resolution.

Summarized with AI on January 23. AI used: gpt-5.
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Hello,

I saw this question being asked several times already, but with Shopify 2.0 up and running, I will repeat it, maybe some new solutions have come.

Is it possible (without 3rd party app) to display all inventory locations a product has, with stock levels? Taking this information from back end:

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And show it on the product page front-end, something like this:

SkinClinicLT_1-1677589095962.png
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The main issue is, that we don’t hold a lot of stock in our own warehouses, but we offer 1 - 2 day shipping if we have stock. If we don’t have stock in our warehouse - we ship products from a foreign warehouse, and the shipping time raise to 10 - 14 days, and we have to notify customers regards this.

Currently, I am using meta-fields in products, but as you can guess - it’s not dynamic, and I have to change it regularly.

Thank you for any advice!

1 Like
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@SkinClinicLT not sure if you have solved this. This may not be possible as of yet b/c Inventory count can only be queried via Shopify’s admin api.

Implementing Admin api on your online storefront is not good because it exposes admin token to online users. Some user can take advantage of this and query a whole bunch of things for your Shopify store.

Knowing you don’t want to install 3rd party apps, you will need to implement a solution of your own. One way, we have been doing this is syncing all our variant inventory into a database in a frequency interval. Then from our online storefront querying that database through REST API to display the inventory count of the selected variant. You do need a cloud service to make this possible.

Here’s a tutorial I wrote that answers this problem if you do have that cloud service.

Screenshot 2023-07-19 at 4.00.52 PM.png
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