We run a wine store where backorder inventory is a core part of our catalogue. Since enabling the Shopify Inbox agen, we’ve noticed it consistently excludes products with zero stock from search results and recommendations - even when those products are published and available to order as backorders.
This creates an incomplete customer experience: shoppers ask about a wine, the agent either can’t find it or doesn’t surface it, and the sale is lost.
What we’d like:
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A setting to include all published products in agent results regardless of stock level
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Or at way to flag products as orderable, so the agent treats them as available
Has anyone found a workaround beyond Knowledge Base facts? And is this on Shopify’s roadmap for the Inbox agent?
No dedicated toggle for this right now - Inbox’s agent leans on the same inventory signal as the storefront. The workaround that’s worked for others: turn on “Continue selling when out of stock” on the backorder variants, since that makes Shopify treat them as available/orderable rather than zero-stock, which should let the agent surface them again. Worth pairing with clear “ships in X weeks” copy in the product description so customers aren’t surprised. Also worth filing as feedback via the in-app Inbox settings, since merchant control over this isn’t public roadmap info.
This looks like two different states being collapsed into one: zero on hand and not orderable. For a backorder business, those are not equivalent.
I would not work around it by adding fake inventory, because that makes fulfillment and availability reporting less trustworthy. The useful product signal would be “available for sale / backorder allowed,” ideally at variant and market level.
For escalation, capture one exact query, the published variant, continue selling state, the missing recommendation, and proof that the same variant can be added to cart. That gives Shopify a reproducible discovery failure rather than a general feature request.
Worth weighing before you flip continue selling on the backorder variants: that flag doesn’t only talk to Inbox. It makes the variant read as available everywhere, so the PDP stops showing sold out and any notify me / back in stock flow never fires, since from Shopify’s side the item never goes unavailable. If you don’t run those, fine. If you do, you’re swapping one lost sale for another.
(I build a small back in stock app, so that’s the corner I’m seeing this from.)
I run a competing AI sales agent, and here’s how we handle it.
The issue is “Continue selling when out of stock” means both “I’ll take backorders” and “treat this as in stock everywhere”. But in this case, you only want the first half.
Any agent reading that flag runs into the same wall, so this isn’t really something you can configure your way around in Inbox.
The way I’ve worked through this is to stop treating allocations as out of stock at all. List the incoming vintage as its own product, with the allocation you actually hold as genuine stock, and the arrival in the title. “2022 Barolo, arriving March” is really in stock, so the agent surfaces it, the customer knows exactly what they’re buying, and your inventory numbers stay honest.
That also gets around what @Luca_Bartoccini raised, since your notify-me flows keep working normally on the things that are genuinely sold out.