When I send a customer an invoice to pay from a draft order, they are getting an error message saying that the items are “sold out” and that there are “inventory issues” but this is incorrect. Not only do I have lots of inventory of the products, they are also set to “continue selling when out of stock”. This has never happened before and is preventing me from operating my business.
Topic summary
Main issue: Customers paying via draft order invoices see “sold out” and “inventory issues,” despite sufficient stock and the setting “continue selling when out of stock.”
Scope: Problem appears limited to products not assigned to any sales channels. These items are intentionally unpublished (no channels) and used only for special customers via draft orders.
Background: This workflow functioned for over a year. Recently, checkout began blocking these items with inventory errors.
State of inventory/settings: Plenty of stock available; “continue selling when out of stock” enabled.
Impact: Draft order checkouts fail, preventing sales for those private products.
Possible cause: Merchant suspects a Shopify platform change or a new bug affecting draft orders for channel-excluded products.
Status: No resolution or official confirmation in the thread. Discussion remains open; key question is whether this is a bug or an intentional system change.
It appears that this happening only to products that I currently don’t have included in any sales channels. There are products that I reserve only for special customers that I don’t want listed on my general website. To prevent them from appearing I don’t include them in any sales channels but can include them on draft orders. This has worked well for over a year and now all of a sudden the checkout isn’t working because of “inventory issues”. Is this a Shopify bug or did they change their system in some way?