Hi everyone, Emma here from Harvest Home Co. We’ve been running into a little bump in the road with managing our inventory lately. We’re finding that some of our best-selling items, like our beeswax food wraps and wooden kitchen utensils, are frequently going out of stock before we can restock them. I don’t want to disappoint our customers by showing them items they can’t buy, but I also don’t want to confuse them with ‘out of stock’ messages when they’re actually available again. How are you all handling backorders? Any tips or apps you’re using to manage this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Hi @EcoEmmaHome 
We ran into something similar with a few fast-moving products. What worked best for us was treating “out of stock” and “backorder” as two different customer experiences rather than trying to avoid both completely.
For products that regularly sell through before restocking, we allow purchases to continue but make the expected lead time very visible on the product page, cart, and order confirmation. Customers are usually fine waiting if expectations are set clearly upfront.
We also found that inventory visibility matters just as much as inventory quantity. Sometimes products were technically back in stock, but updates weren’t reflected everywhere quickly enough, which created confusion for customers.
One thing that helped was improving inventory synchronization and low-stock monitoring so we could react before products actually hit zero. Tools like Easify Inventory Sync can be useful if you’re managing stock across multiple products, locations, or stores and want inventory updates to stay consistent automatically.
Another tactic that’s worked well is setting up low-stock alerts based on sales velocity rather than waiting until inventory reaches zero. A product selling 10 units per day needs a very different reorder threshold than one selling 1 unit per day.
For your beeswax wraps and wooden utensils specifically, I’d probably test a simple backorder/pre-order workflow with a clearly communicated restock timeline rather than completely hiding the products once they sell out. Many customers are willing to wait for handmade or specialty items as long as they know what to expect.
Out of curiosity, are you manufacturing these products yourselves or purchasing them from suppliers? The answer would influence whether I’d lean more toward backorders, pre-orders, or tighter inventory forecasting.
Hi @EcoEmmaHome,
If restocking is predictable, Shopify already lets you enable “Continue selling when out of stock” for specific products or variants, so customers can still place an order while inventory is at zero.
If the restock timing is a bit uncertain, another option is to show a Preorder button. Customers can still place an order, and you can add a short note such as “Ships as soon as possible” or an estimated shipping window to set expectations clearly.
If you really don’t know when the item will be back, I’d use a “Notify me when available” button instead. This lets you capture interested customers without taking orders you may not be able to fulfill soon.
There are also apps with free plans that support both preorder and back-in-stock notifications, such as:
Best,
Ellie from BOGOS: Free Gift Bundle Upsell team
Those three states are the right starting point. I’d make the customer promise explicit and measurable:
• In stock = normal dispatch
• Backorder = order now + a dated shipping window
• Notify me = no order taken
Then track backorder PDP → ATC, cancellation before fulfillment, “where is my order?” contacts, and delivered-late rate. If backorders generate sales but also cancellations and support tickets, the message may be visible while the promise is still not trusted or kept.
The thing that finally stopped the confusion for us was only allowing backorders on items where we actually trusted the supplier’s restock date - anything with an unknown timeline gets an email signup instead of taking the order.
Being specific matters more than the mechanism: “ships by Sept 15” caused zero complaints, while “ships as soon as possible” generated exactly the where-is-my-order emails you’re trying to avoid.
Since your beeswax wraps and utensils seem to sell out on a fairly regular cycle, you could even show the next restock date on the product page while it’s still in stock - our regulars started timing their orders around it, and sellouts stopped feeling like a surprise to anyone.
I build a restock alert app, so I mostly see this from the notify-me side: the waiting list is usually longer than the restock. If 200 people are on it and 30 wraps come back, mailing all 200 at once puts most of them on a sold out page, and to them that looks identical to a broken alert even though your stock was real. Sending in batches sized to what you actually got back, and re-checking the stock right before each batch goes out, is what fixes it.
One thing worth deciding is what happens on a mixed cart. Let’s say someone buys a backordered wrap and an in-stock utensil together.
If you hold the whole order until the wrap arrives, the person who bought something you had on the shelf waits three weeks and emails you about it. If you split it, you pay shipping twice.
Either is fine, but you have to pick one and then say it on the product page, something like in-stock items ship separately and first.
That’s where most of our confusion came from, rather than the backorder message itself. The customer had read and accepted the delay on the item they knew was delayed, then got surprised by the other one.
Hey @EcoEmmaHome, If you want to keep selling without confusing customers with stale “out of stock” tags once you’re actually restocked, there are a few things that can help.
If backorders work for you, an easy fix is enabling “Continue selling when out of stock.” You’ll find it in Shopify under Products → Inventory.
But since these are your best-sellers going out of stock repeatedly, it seems like your inventory isn’t synced while restocking and being forecasted properly. The real fix will be inventory sync just after you restock them, proper demand forecasting, a clear view of your supplier lead times, and a safety buffer so you can reorder before you hit zero.
You can manually do these using Shopify reports, or if you want an automated system with a comprehensive workflow, you can look at apps like ChannelBay, which syncs with Shopify and updates the restocked items on the dashboard. It also tracks stock levels, days left, and reorder quantities, so you don’t have to calculate them manually.
I’d set this up with four clear rules:
- Enable Continue selling when out of stock only for variants with a confirmed restock date.
- Put a specific shipping window beside the Add to cart button, in the cart, and in the order confirmation.
- If the date slips, email affected customers immediately and offer a one-click cancellation.
- For uncertain restocks, disable purchasing and use a back-in-stock signup instead.
Also set low-stock alerts using supplier lead time. If wraps sell 5 per day and take 14 days to arrive, alert at 70 units plus a small buffer. That gives you time to reorder before hitting zero.
Hi Emma! I’d recommend setting up low-stock alerts and automatic back-in-stock notifications. That way, customers can join a waitlist when an item sells out and get notified automatically once it’s available again. Shopify has apps that can handle this pretty smoothly.
Hi there @EcoEmmaHome
One approach is to turn on continue selling when out of stock for products that you are comfortable backordering, then clearly communicate on the product page with a dirty dispatch date. For products you can’t backorder, just leave inventory tracking on so Shopify will automaticaly show them as out of stock. I also recommend setting your low stock alerts and monitoring your sales velocity frequently so you can reorder before you hit zero. This results in a more clean customer experience without any confusion about availability.
Hi @EcoEmmaHome,
Differentiating “out of stock” from “backorder” is critical for customer trust. The main technical challenge merchants encounter when enabling backorders isn’t display messaging—it’s managing incoming inventory allocations and sync latency.
Two backend bottlenecks often cause backorder setups to break:
- Overselling Incoming Shipments: Allowing “continue selling when out of stock” without binding available units to confirmed incoming Purchase Orders risks selling beyond upcoming factory capacity, resulting in extended delays and cancellations.
- Allocation Drift on Restock: When a restock shipment arrives, standard connectors often push the full physical count to live storefront inventory without reserving units for pre-existing backorders first. This exposes backordered stock to immediate new checkout buyers before original customer orders fulfill.
To maintain inventory integrity and transparent customer timelines:
- PO-Bound Backorder Caps: Link backorder availability directly to confirmed inbound Purchase Order quantities so backorders automatically disable once the incoming shipment sells through.
- Priority Allocation Locks: Reserve incoming inventory immediately upon receiving scan confirmation to fulfill existing backorders before updating live available counts on sales channels.
We engineered an autonomous inventory state engine that manages inbound PO allocation locks and dynamic backorder availability thresholds in real time. Happy to share technical details or offer a free 30-day inventory audit if you’d like to streamline your restock pipeline!
The thing that cleared this up for us was treating it as three separate states with three different labels, and never letting them share one message:
- In stock - normal add to cart, nothing extra.
-
- Backorder / preorder - purchasable, but the button says “Preorder - ships week of X” and that same lead time repeats in cart, at checkout, and in the confirmation email. Customers accept a wait; what they don’t accept is finding out after they pay.
-
- Notify-me only - no reliable inbound date yet, so don’t take money. Just capture interest.
- Two details that saved us support tickets: only allow purchase in state 2 when you actually have a confirmed inbound date (otherwise you’re just moving the disappointment later), and check the “continue selling when out of stock” flag per variant rather than per product - mixed variants on one page is where the confusing messaging usually creeps in.
- The part most people underestimate is state 3. A notify-me email is fine, but a lot of interested shoppers never open it, and if you only have email you end up leaning on the popup to do too much work.
Disclosure: we built Atomato (Atomato Email, SMS & Upsell - Grow email and SMS lists and upsell from a feed... | Shopify App Store) for exactly that gap - it’s an onsite notification feed/bell rather than an ESP, so restocks, drops, offers and upsells sit in a persistent bell on your storefront, and it can also send email/SMS. We’d keep your existing popup running as a second channel; the bell catches the returning visitor who already dismissed the popup once, and the popup keeps doing first-visit capture. Different jobs, not a replacement.
Whatever you use, the labelling discipline in points 1-3 does most of the heavy lifting.
One number that might help you decide how much of this to automate. We check storefronts from the outside at some volume, and in the last pass half of the stores had at least one product that was sold out on every option and still sitting live in the catalogue. The typical store had about twenty of them. That is the confusing version of “out of stock”: a shopper reaches the page from a collection, a search result or Google, and there is nothing to do there.
So before choosing an app, run one check: filter your products for zero available on all variants and see how many are still published. Each of those needs to be in exactly one of the three states people described above, and the cheapest fix for the ones with no restock date is to unpublish them from the online store rather than delete them, so the URL and its search ranking come back when stock does.
The trap to watch after you switch on “continue selling when out of stock” is that it is set per variant. One wrap size left on backorder while the others say sold out is where most of the mixed messages come from.