New Abandoned Cart for a long sold out product??

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

Users are experiencing abandoned carts containing products that have been sold out for weeks, despite having “Continue selling when out of stock” disabled. The Add to Cart button correctly shows as disabled on the live site, making it unclear how items were added.

Key Details:

  • One user received an abandoned cart with suspicious/test information (random name and email)
  • Another user encountered this issue twice in two weeks, both from USA customers
  • The second case also involved incorrect currency conversion (£495 displayed as $495 USD)

Current Status:

  • Shopify support has escalated the issue but no resolution yet
  • Users suspect possible fraudulent activity or system glitch
  • The mechanism allowing out-of-stock items into carts remains unexplained
Summarized with AI on November 1. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Noticed a strange thing today and wondering how it would be possible. I have a product that’s still listed but it’s been sold out for a few weeks. “Continue selling when out of stock” is unchecked and when I go to my site the “Add to Cart” is disabled as it should be and it cannot be added to cart. How then did they manage to add it to cart in the first place?

Both the name and email in the abandoned cart are mumbo-jumbo so it was clearly a “test” of some kind (perhaps an attempt to use a stolen card) so, although this would be the likely answer, I highly doubt it was added to cart weeks ago and they just now decided to go through the rest of the steps. I imagine if they were testing card numbers or trying to make a fraudulent purchase they would have done so long ago when they first added it to cart (back when it was still in stock). Any theories?

2 Likes
2

I have had this same issue twice in the past two weeks, shopify help is stuck on this issue and has escalated it for me, I’m waiting for a response!

Both my carts were from the USA and both managed to add out of stock items for the GBP value £495 as USD $495 which is a totally incorrect conversion anyway even if it was in stock, totally confused.