Hi,
I have just launched a new print on demand shop and was wondering if anyone could tell me how inventory works for tracking? How does tracking quantity works in this case? Do you use Shopify tracking inventory or Don’t track inventory, as I am using a 3rd party app. life Printify and Printful for inventory?
Can someone share some insight on this?
Thanks!
Hi @ViToy
When you use those 3rd party POD apps, and publish the products from the app, it will set up the inventory tracking accordingly. The inventory is set to be managed by the app.
Is that setting done automatically? I don’t see a feature that tells me my inventory is being managed by the app.
Right now, when I added a new product to Shopify it displays “Inventory not tracked by Shopify”. Or the other option is “Inventory tracked by Shopify”.
im having the same problem dude
…not sure how the notifications work so I’ll have to post same reply to the last two posters on here as I’ve been having the very SAME issue.
NOTE - this is my personal understanding based on communications with Printify Support - lots of confusion here so it’s possible I misunderstood - but will relay my personal experience & perspective below.
I use Printify & just launched my store a short while ago - noticed thru testing some of the most popular color/size variants where showing as UNAVAILABLE in my Shopify store.
Note that if you are in Shopify & go to ‘All Products’ then click on a given product - then scroll down to the variants section - the click on the ‘EDIT’ button to the right on a variant - you will be taken to a screen where under the ‘Inventory’ section it will state ‘Inventory Managed By’ - which in MY case was defaulted to Printify. Okay, so they’re handling the inventory, right? Great!
And so I directly ASKED Printify Support whether or not these color/size combos were showing as UNAVAILABLE on my store because they were out-of-stock from my supplier AND if this would automatically update once they were BACK in stock. I also asked them whether opting into their supplier re-routing program would automatically open up inventory or whether that was for orders that had already been submitted but were then found to be unavailable thru the primary supplier after the order had been already placed.
The FIRST reply I received seemed to clearly confirm what I stated above - that UNAVAILABLE items in my store reflected items out-of-stock from my primary supplier which would be automatically updated on my sales channel once they re-stocked - AND that indeed the re-routing program was only for orders already placed but no longer available thru the primary supplier. Okay, that made sense to me.
After receiving a sample shirt I decided I had to tweak nearly ALL of my designs in Printify & republish to Shopify - including adding add’l images etc - major pain but had to be done. THEN I ran some ad campaigns & drew in plenty of visitors with no luck… and when I re-checked my Shopify store, I noticed nearly ALL the most popular color/size combos for 2 of my 3 POD products were now showing as UNAVAILABLE. So I asked Printify if they thought it might be better to switch Shopify’s ‘Inventory Managed By’ setting to me or to engage the ‘Continue Selling when Out-of-Stock’ feature in hopes that perhaps some backup supplier might be able to fulfill orders… and I got kind of a wishy washy response so I told them that seeing as there’s no point in wasting any more ad dollars promoting unavailable products, I’ve put my ads on hold & effectively shut down my store until these issues get figured out.
THAT’s when I was informed that despite what I had understood earlier, my Shopify store would NOT receive stock availability information automatically from Printify. It was suggested that I would have to RE-publish my products from Printify in order to update the availability - which was not an option for me due to the sheer # of products & add’l images/descriptions I had to manually add in Shopify. To make matters worse, I then discovered that Printify didn’t publish ALL color/size variants to my store setting unavailable variants to zero or anything like that… no, they just ONLY sent whatever WAS available at the time of upload - so even if I WANTED to try & sell items out-of-stock from my primary supplier hoping SOME backup provider might be able to fulfill the orders… I couldn’t do it - they basically didn’t exist. And honestly, they appear to me to have even LESS available now then before.
In desperation, I asked if they might at least be able to provide a spreadsheet with ALL the possible color/size combos & SKUs so that I might have a chance at creating a bulk upload that’d give me the OPTION to make more products available for sale in hopes that a backup supplier could fulfill them but was told that wasn’t possible.
Maybe there’s some fix out there I’m simply unaware of… and I am ALL EARS to anyone out there who has a solution - but as for now, I figure I’m basically out of the POD business as I am not spending ad dollars just to disappoint anyone who might actually have some interest in buying my POD designs. I suspect people who already had their Shopify stores set up before COVID probably didn’t encounter this massive unavailability issue on their front end, although they’ve obviously had fulfillment challenges on the back end.
Sorry for the long explanation - but I sure wish I had this info earlier myself…
…hey - may want to check out my response below…
I did the same things you’ve done, republish, restock, reimage, etc, etc, etc…it is a PAIN no less. And now I switched to Printful and I find them a bit more helpful. So under their product images, they give you the information on stock/product availability and that’s a bit more helpful than other POD shops I have used. And after I changed my option to “Shopify does not manage inventory”, my inventory no long shows ‘out of stock’ messages now. I don’t know how if that’ll be true once I do actually get a sale. I guess we’ll see. Like you, I ran some campaigns and got lots of views, but no sales. It’s quite difficult to launch business during the pandemic. If anyone has any ideas how to land a first sale, please share.
I am just stocking based on this information now. If you want to use another app, try Printful at least it has a bit more information to provide. My advice is to just restock a few products to start with, run few ads, then see what happens. Sharing some images here from Printful, hopefully, this’ll be helpful to you. I restocked and republished multiple times. I am on the same boat as you.
