Major inventory issue - out of stock items available for purchase

Shopify Discussion
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Topic summary

A merchant reported a critical inventory synchronization bug where products with zero stock remained purchasable on their storefront, despite having “Continue selling when out of stock” disabled.

Key Details:

  • Admin inventory showed “0 available/on hand” at product level, but the product listing displayed “1 in stock”
  • Products remained available for purchase on the public website
  • Affected at least two items (HOTLINE TNT and THE DRIN albums) on the same day
  • Similar incidents occurred months earlier, resulting in unfulfillable customer orders

Current Status:

  • The issue appeared to resolve itself after ~5 hours without merchant intervention
  • Products now correctly display as “Sold Out”
  • Another merchant confirmed experiencing identical recurring issues, potentially linked to the Shopify Flow app

Unresolved Questions:

  • Root cause remains unknown
  • No official Shopify response provided
  • Risk of recurrence unclear
Summarized with AI on October 28. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

@Shopify_77

This is not the first time I have noticed the following issue - but this is the first time I’ve noticed it LIVE as it occurs.

I have sold two items today in my store that are the last copy of that stock.

I have taken each out of inventory and it shows 0 available / on hand at product level.

We never “Continue selling when out of stock” and I have confirmed that box is NOT checked.

Later, after looking at my sales sheet I wanted to confirm I had taken these items out of the website. We do it manually, not POS. Searching for artist HOTLINE TNT in the admin I was surprised to see it showing “1 in stock” under the Inventory column. Yet when I click through to the item, the product inventory is 0.

Checking my public website, the HOTLINE TNT album is still available to order.

This has also occurred today with an artist called THE DRIN ‘Elude The Torch’.

I noticed this some months ago and had at least 3 occurrences of customers ordering items I did not have. I was able to see each last sale of those few items had been within a few days of each other.

This time I think I have caught this MAJOR BUG on the first day (at least I hope so, I need to check yesterday’s sales…)

We pride ourselves on having an accurate inventory and not letting customers down by being unable to fulfill their order and so, this is MOST distressing!

The multiple “Inventory correction” today is from me trying to correct the situation. Sorry, was trying to attach 4 Jpeg’s but not enabled.

This urgently needs to be looked into!

2

Can you please share your product url where the inventory count is wrong ?

3

Now it shows as Sold Out.
Interesting, considering i did nothing different from when i stopped
working some 5 hours ago to attend an event…

https://www.strangeworldrecords.com.au/products/hotline-tnt-cartwheel-lp?_pos=1&_sid=57ec3f5ce&_ss=r&variant=41808901570602

4

Glad to hear that it is solved now. Let me know if you are facing the issue again. Glad to help you out.

5

This happens to us all the time. Shopify allows the sale of 1 or 2 items beyond inventory, and then marks is OOS after a few sales are made. This started happening when I installed the Flow app, I think there’s a bug in there.