How to fix 'Continue selling when out of stock' glitch?

[DCWSALES]

Hi all! I am not new to using Shopify, but I don’t “need” to use it all the time. I have a Shopify account so that I can create “stores” for my clients on an as-needed basis. Typically my clients are groups or organizations that need to sell to their members for a specific period of time. I do not sell to the general public. I also am using an older theme (Classic) because I don’t really need to update how said stores look/function for my clients, plus I don’t have time to create all new themes every year. I am capable of editing code, in case that is something that I need to do.

With that being said, I have had my account on Pause since January and am about to launch two stores for two different clients. LOTS of things have changed since I was in my account last. I have mostly been able to work through all the small things that directly affect my older theme, but there is one issue that I cannot seem to get fixed.

If I have a product where inventory needs to be tracked AND I do not want the item to continue to sell once the inventory has been purchased, the site will NOT allow the product to be purchased at all. The only way a product can be purchased is if BOTH ‘Track Quantity’ and ‘Continue selling when out of stock’ are checked.

Doesn’t this defeat the purpose of having stock and not wanting the item to be sold after the stock is depleted? Is there a fix for this or am I screwed and now need to spend unnecessary time creating a new theme? Or, is there a quick fix for this?

Here are some screenshots of one of the products in question to possibly help show what is happening:

#1

#2

#3

#4

As you can see above, the only difference between this product being available to customers is the check mark in the ‘Continue selling when out of stock’ option. I ONLY have (5) of these to offer. I absolutely CANNOT sell any more once they are purchased because the item is no longer manufactured.

Help…please??

Thanks - Dee

P.S. - I was not sure which forum to use so I selected ‘Technical Q&A’. If this needs to be changed/moved, I understand.

P.S.S. - I also have no idea which label to choose because none of them offered look to be related to my issue. I chose ‘Shopify Theme’. Again, my apologies if this is incorrect.

[DCWSALES]

I was going to update my post above with the solution, but it will not allow me to Edit my post.

Solution:
This has to do with Locations that are setup from within Settings and then the location chosen for the product. About a month ago I added a new Location to my account. I now have a warehouse location and an office location - 2 different addresses. The warehouse address was then made to be my default location so that all shipping labels would show it as the ‘ship from’ address. The Shopify program automatically updated some products to reflect this new default location, but it did not update all products. The products that still had my office address location were throwing the errors of the products being out-of-stock. Once I changed them to the correct location (the warehouse/default) all was good! This can be done in bulk using these steps:

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/locations/assigning-inventory-to-locations#stock-products-at-locations-by-using-the-bulk-editor

Huge thanks to Dmitri with Shopify for chatting with me and helping me to get the issue resolved.

[DCWSALES]

2nd UPDATE: to change locations in bulk, tracking of quantities MUST be turned to ON. If you are not tracking a product’s quantity and all variants are set to the wrong location, there is NO WAY to bulk edit the variants to reflect a different location. It must be done manually.

Hopefully, this feature will be implemented soon!