So check this out; I guarantee most people have no clue about this and are always wondering why their inventory is always off in Shopify; I was one of them. Well, here’s one reason why…So, we sold an item at one of our POS locations that did not have the item stocked at this location. So, what happened? It subtracted the inventory from another POS location; it just happened to be that the location it subtracted the inventory from didn’t have it in stock, so it created a negative -1 for that product. The only way I caught this was I always make it a habit to look at the negatives in my inventory and look at the adjustment history for that product and see why it went into the negative, and that’s when I discovered it. There’s no telling how many times this has happened to products where stores actually had inventory. This would be impossible to catch.
This is absurd and just unacceptable. We spend over $2000 a month for Shopify Plus, and to get inaccurate inventory, which should be one of the most basic functions of a POS, is ridiculous. I hope they address this issue. If an item is not stocked and sold at a POS location, then the system should stock that item and then subtract it from that POS location after the sale goes through. This Is frustrating.
So I contacted Shopify support and here’s what I got.
This issue is likely due to Shopify’s overselling function, which considers total inventory and not individual location inventory. If a line item has sufficient total inventory but no single location has sufficient inventory, the line item will oversell at the highest priority location that has inventory, including those not available for online orders. This can result in inventory discrepancies between locations.
Overselling happens when you sell more of a product than the quantity that you have in stock for that product at that location. Shopify’s oversell protection (continue selling when out of stock is not checked) takes total inventory into account, and not individual location inventory. Therefore it is expected that if a line item has sufficient total inventory, but no single location has sufficient inventory, the line item will oversell at the highest priority location that has inventory, including those not available normally for online orders.
And they sent me this link. https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/locations/setting-up-your-location-fulfillments