How to know when an order is ready to ship (stock is available) without checking every single item?

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment

Topic summary

Core issue: Stores that allow “continue selling when out of stock” can’t quickly see if an order is ready to ship without opening each line item to check inventory. Users want a native stock indicator (counts or color dots) on order line items and a warning when fulfilling without inventory.

Current status: No built-in solution. A Shopify staffer logged a feature request; future updates will appear on the changelog. Discussion remains open.

Workarounds and apps mentioned:

  • Arigato (automation): Tags orders with backordered SKU and supplier; partial help.
  • Shippable (auto-tag “ready to ship”): Previously worked but was removed from the App Store.
  • Shopify Flow “Ready to fulfill” trigger: Reported to fire incorrectly when stock is insufficient.
  • Ablestar Automatic Order Tags: Reported to work well for tagging fulfillable orders; adopted successfully by some.
  • iPacky “Order availability”: Advertised to compute fully/partially fulfillable orders and handle order changes; supports manual/tag-based ignores and recalculation.
  • Zorp “AI Alerts & Auto-Resolution”: Can check inventory on order and send Slack alerts or auto-create POs.

Other notes: One user flagged ShipStation–Shopify sync mismatches after line-item edits. An image mock proposing color markers was shared.

Summarized with AI on December 28. AI used: gpt-5.
2

Crickets? Bueller?

I can’t imagine that we’re the only ones with this issue.

I guess there’s no solution for it.

Shopify, isn’t it something that we would expect in the system, that we would be somehow warned if we’re fulfilling an item that we don’t have inventory for?

That seems awfully basic to me.