We have a bricks-and-mortar shop and an online shop, both working from the same inventory.
Whenever we receive or create new stock, we add it to our Shopify inventory. When something is purchased online, the quantity is automatically deducted from the shop stock.
The problem we’re having is that our Shopify inventory is often inaccurate. I’m not entirely sure whether this is due to human error when adding stock, staff accidentally selling the wrong item, or a combination of both.
One of the main issues I’ve noticed is Shopify’s inventory interface. At the moment, it seems that you have to save twice before the stock quantity actually updates, which makes the process unnecessarily awkward and increases the chance of mistakes.
Does anyone know of an app or alternative inventory management system that is more user-friendly than Shopify’s built-in inventory system, particularly for quickly adding and adjusting stock?
Any recommendations or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Before you shop for a replacement, get the admin to tell you which of your two theories it is, because it already knows and the two need different fixes. Every quantity change writes a history entry with a reason and a timestamp, visible per variant and aggregated under the inventory adjustment reports in Analytics. Pull a month for your ten worst SKUs. A receiving mistake shows up as a single received or correction entry with the wrong number, at a time of day when someone was unpacking. Wrong item sold shows up as a sale on variant A and then, minutes later, an unexplained correction on variant B, usually two variants that look alike on a shelf. Those two patterns do not resemble each other, so half an hour of reading gets you off guessing.
On the saving twice, one thing worth ruling out first. Available is not a stored number, it is what is left over. On hand is the total physically at the location and it equals available plus committed plus reserved plus damaged plus safety stock plus quality control. So if someone types a new figure into Available while units are committed to unfulfilled online orders, the number sitting there afterwards is not the number they typed, which reads exactly like the save did not take and invites a second go. New stock arriving should go into On hand. If your staff have been correcting Available all this time, that on its own would produce steady drift in a shop that also sells online.
The other one specific to your setup is that a typed number has nothing to check against. Received through a transfer or a purchase order, the count runs against an expected quantity and a mismatch surfaces while the box is still open. Typed straight into the grid, a 12 that should have been 21 is invisible until a customer finds it months later. That is a process change rather than an app and it is usually the bigger win.
Which is most of the app answer too. Inventory apps write through the same API and inherit the same states, so a friendlier grid does not fix a receiving process, it mostly makes the wrong number quicker to enter. The ones that earn their keep are the ones that put receiving behind a document and support a barcode scanner for counts, because typing is where your errors are being born. Scanning also gives you cycle counts you can run a shelf at a time each week instead of a full stocktake you keep postponing.
How many SKUs are you carrying, and are the shop and the online store on one location in Shopify or two?
Hi, I created Inventory Guardian to solve this exact problem with Shopify’s native inventory. You can make adjustments in the app or on the product pages, set custom reasons to track inventory more accurately and filter adjustments by reason, user/app and much more to drill down when there are inventory discrepancies.
Hello @edwardandirwyn, @lumine’s breakdown above is spot on - the Available vs On hand distinction is exactly where this kind of drift usually starts. One more thing worth checking: if the shop and online store are set up as two separate locations in Shopify rather than one shared location, a sale won’t auto-deduct the other location’s stock, staff need an explicit Transfer to move it across. If corrections have been typed into both locations instead of transferred, that alone produces steady drift. Settings > Locations will tell you which setup you’re on.
If this helped, please mark it a solution
Two things I would add to lumine’s reading of the history. First, decide which number staff are allowed to type into and make it On hand, with a reason, never Available: Available is derived from On hand minus committed, so editing it directly is where a lot of the “did that save?” confusion comes from.
Second, run the cheapest possible test before evaluating any app: pick ten SKUs, write down On hand tonight, count them physically tomorrow morning before the shop opens, and read the adjustment history for anything in between. If the numbers match at open and drift by close, the problem is at the counter; if they are wrong at open, it is receiving. Whatever app you choose will only be as good as which of those two you fix.
One more case the history will show you: a bulk adjustment or an import that set dozens of quantities wrong in one go. That is not a process problem, it is a rollback problem - StoreVault, which I build, keeps inventory levels with every version, so a bad batch is reverted to yesterday’s numbers instead of re-counted by hand.
Before switching systems, worth diagnosing where the discrepancy is actually coming from, because the fix depends entirely on the root cause.
A few things worth checking first:
Available vs On Hand confusion
This is the most common culprit. “Available” in Shopify is a derived number, On Hand minus committed orders. If staff are adjusting “Available” directly rather than “On Hand,” the numbers drift in ways that are hard to trace. Make sure everyone on the team is adjusting On Hand with a reason code, not Available.
Location setup
If your physical store and online store are set up as separate Shopify locations, stock needs to be allocated correctly between them. A common mistake is both channels drawing from the same location without realising it or staff completing in-store sales against the wrong location.
Adjustment history
Go to your worst-performing SKUs and pull the full adjustment history. Look for patterns, bulk imports that changed quantities unexpectedly, corrections after sales, receiving entries that don’t match purchase orders. The history usually points to exactly where the drift started.
Receiving process
If stock is being received without a formal process, someone just adjusting quantities manually rather than through a purchase order or transfer errors compound over time and become nearly impossible to trace.
The big issue we have is that we are constantly updating the stock inventory as we produce food products that are packed every day. As for as I can see there’s no real way of seeing what the issue could be without it being human error based.
I’ll proceed by doing a couple of stock checks as the start of a day and at the end. One day where we don’t add any things to the inventory and an other where we do. Then at least I can see if it’s an issue with adding things to the inventory or an issue with staff putting the wrong item through the till.
You’ve actually described a workflow where automation could make a real difference.
If stock is being updated constantly as products are produced and packed, I’d be less worried about replacing Shopify and more interested in removing the repeated manual updates and checks around it.
Especially if the same process happens every day, there may be a way to have the stock movement recorded automatically and flag the exceptions instead of relying on staff to catch everything manually.
I’d be interested to hear how you’re currently recording the quantities produced before they get added to Shopify.
Others here already nailed a lot of the Shopify-side gotchas (On hand vs Available, reason codes, one location vs two, and the open/close count test). That controlled check is a smart move. If the miss shows up on the day you add production stock, the pain is almost always entry workflow, not mysterious online deductions.
For daily food production into shared shop + online inventory, native Shopify can still get you far if you stop treating adds as freehand adjustments:
Receive finished packs through a purchase order or transfer into the right location (not typed On hand edits when you can avoid them)
Scan barcodes at receive and at till so staff are not picking the wrong variant
Keep adjustments rare, always with a reason, and review adjustment history on the SKUs that drift
If the double-save feel and constant typed updates are still fighting you after that, you are bumping into the floor gap Shopify does not really cover: fast scan-based receiving, staff-safe quantity changes, and shelf-level counts without living in the admin. I work on SKUSavvy which is a mobile WMS, 3D bin map, pick routing, directed put-away, forecasting, and two-way Shopify sync. Worth a look if the daily pack-and-add loop is the real bottleneck: SKUSavvy Mobile WMS - Ship high-volume orders without the ERP bloat | Shopify App Store
Happy to compare notes on the open/close test results if you want a second pair of eyes.
I’d be careful about buying a new app to fix accuracy. Drift like yours is rarely the interface. It’s that nothing counts the shelf on a schedule, so every small error sits there compounding quietly, month after month, until the annual count finally surfaces the whole lot as one big number nobody can trace back to a cause.
Count one section a week instead. One vendor, one rail. Fifteen minutes before opening.
A section counted every six weeks never drifts far enough to hurt, and you catch the wrong-item-sold ones while someone still remembers the sale.
Two things decide whether staff keep doing it. Scanning has to add one to a count rather than open a field for someone to type a number into, because typing is where most of the fat-finger errors come from, and nothing should reach live stock until a person has approved the differences.
Your admin can settle which of your two theories it is, by the way. Every quantity change carries a reason and a timestamp. Pull a month for your ten worst SKUs.
The real issue is the cycle: manual stock entry, a wrong number slips in, Shopify shows the incorrect count, that bad number gets used in the next sale or adjustment, inventory drifts even further off, you manually correct it
You can fix this issue by using barcode-based receiving and selling to reduce quantity and SKU errors, and regular barcode stocktakes to catch any differences between your physical and system stock. Real-time syncing then keeps the corrected inventory updated across your online and physical stores.
For the double-save glitch specifically: try clearing your browser cache, disabling extensions, or testing on the Shopify app to rule out a local interface issue.
If you want something that handles this end-to-end with a user-friendly UX, ChannelBay could be a good fit. It covers real-time sync, barcode stocktakes and receiving, PO management, and multi-store tracking, all of which help cut down on manual errors and inventory mismatches.
Hi @edwardandirwyn Welcome To Shopify Community So The “save twice” behavior you’re noticing is actually intentional Shopify design, not a bug, adjustments are saved as pending first (marked with an icon per row), and clicking Save at the top applies all pending changes at once. This lets you batch multiple adjustments across products/locations before committing, but it does create exactly the risk you’re describing: if someone thinks a single click saved it, or navigates away before hitting the top Save button, the change is silently discarded, no confirmation, no error, it just doesn’t happen. That’s a very plausible source of your inaccuracy problem, especially with staff who aren’t fully trained on this two-step flow.
Before switching tools entirely, it’s worth ruling out this exact failure mode first, staff training on “always confirm the top Save button was clicked” (or checking the recent inventory history log after busy periods to spot missed saves) might fix a meaningful chunk of the inaccuracy without needing a new system.
If you do want a more streamlined tool, most inventory apps built for hybrid retail+online setups (POS + ecommerce same stock) offer a single-tap adjust rather than Shopify’s pending-then-confirm flow, that’s specifically the friction point apps in this space compete on. Since you mentioned this is a two-location (or omnichannel) setup, look specifically for apps that support multi-location stock reconciliation and physical counts, not just single-location quick-adjust, since that’s the part generic inventory apps sometimes handle worse than Shopify’s native system despite being “easier” for single adjustments.
Hope this helps, and if it does, don’t forget to like and mark it as the solution. Thank you!
Hello @edwardandirwyn, @lumine’s breakdown of receiving-mistake vs wrong-item-sold patterns above is exactly the right first move. One thing to add on the audit trail side: you don’t need to wait on an app for this - each variant’s Inventory tab in Admin already has an “Adjustment history” panel showing every change with a reason and timestamp, so you can pull your ten worst SKUs and read that history by hand today, free, before committing to any tool.
