A merchant is expanding into both e-commerce and physical retail, seeking solutions for managing inventory across both channels to prevent overselling low-stock items.
Core Challenge:
When inventory runs low (e.g., 5 units remaining), online orders could be placed while the last units sell in-store, creating fulfillment issues
Need to automatically remove products from the website when stock falls below a threshold
Proposed Solution:
Implement “safety stock” buffers that reserve inventory for physical stores
Calculate available online inventory as: current inventory minus safety stock
Example: With 97 total units and 3 safety stock, only 94 appear available online
Implementation Discussion:
One approach uses Shopify’s “Available” vs “Unavailable” inventory fields to manually set aside safety stock per product
The original poster plans to use Shopify POS for unified inventory management
Safety buffers would vary by product based on popularity
Unresolved Questions:
How to bulk-apply safety stock settings across thousands of products via CSV import/export
Whether manual one-by-one configuration is the only current option
Participants note surprise that Shopify lacks built-in safety stock features despite offering integrated online/offline solutions
Summarized with AI on October 27.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
We’re looking to expand into an ecom + bricks and mortar store, and wondered if anyone already doing so has a solution to this potential problem:
We have a particular product that is available in store and online - with only 5 units left available.
As it’s only a small amount left to sell - and we could potentially sell out of the inventory in an afternoon, I want this particular product to automatically come offline on the website if the inventory falls below a certain level, as it’s possible that if someone places an order while it’s still in stock, and someone buys the last one off the shop floor before we print off and pick the order, we won’t be able to fulfil it.
I’ve reached out to Shopify support and they have suggested that I reach out here to see how other business with both ecom and physical stores handle this - so any advice greatly welcomed!
Having a safety stock limit is really important. Calculations for such can be as simple or complex as you need.
Our clients typically address this in their ERP by only sending a stock value to shopify that is their current inventory - safety stock. i.e. if Safety Stock is 3 and Total Stock is 97 they send 97-3 = 94 to Shopify for sale.
Thanks for getting back. We’re potentially looking to use Shopify POS - so completely controlling the stock levels through Shopify. So the stock levels represented for reporting need to be accurate, but the stock sent to the actual website needs to have the safety buffer built in.
This would be a different safety buffer per product - so for more popular products we would need to set a higher limit.
I’m surprised Shopify doesn’t have this feature considering that they are offering an instore and online solution!
Thanks so much! So.. My understanding is - If I receive 100 units of an item, but want at least 5 as safety stock, I add 100 into “Available”, and then adjust 5 into the “Unavailable” field - as below:
