Product variant out of stock

Hello,

I have 50 products with same 12 variants. let’s say I don’t have one variant of each product for a week. I currently hace “continue selling when out of stock” ticked. Is it possible to untick this option for one variant of each product automatically? I don’t want to to it manually in bulk edit.

Hi @MatasMo ,

There’s two ways I can think of to do this, either using native Shopify spreadsheet export or with a third-party app.

Shopify spreadsheet export/import

You can update the “continue selling when out of stock” field for a set of variants at once using the Shopify export/import in the Shopify admin. At a high level you can:

  1. Export your products to a CSV from the Shopify admin
  2. Remove all the columns from the file except for:
    1. Handle
    2. Title
    3. Option1 Value
    4. Option2 Value
    5. Option3 Value
    6. Variant Inventory Policy
  3. For the variants that you want to prevent overselling, change the value of the “Variant Inventory Policy” column to “deny”
  4. Import the spreadsheet in the Shopify admin with the “Overwrite products with matching handles.” checkbox selected

If you use this method your spreadsheet should look something like this:

A few notes to using this method:

  1. Make sure you include all variants from the products in the spreadsheet. If you don’t include a variant Shopify will delete it and you won’t be able to recover it
  2. I’d recommend duplicating 1-2 products and testing on those first to make sure it works as required

A third-party app

If you’re open to using a third-part app I’d recommend checking out our Ablestar Bulk Product Editor. With the app you can quickly update specific variants with a live preview and one-click undo. After you install the app you would:

Search for the specific variants you wanted, for example ones where the “Option 1 value” equals a specific value:

Configure the modification to the ‘Continue selling inventory when out of stock field’ and preview the changes:

Run the edit and see the products as they’re updated. You can also cancel or undo the edit from this screen:

Happy to answer any other questions you might have, either about using the spreadsheet or the app. Thanks,

Daniel