A Shopify store owner using the Minimal theme wants to prevent customers from adding more items to the cart than are actually in stock, because the current error only appears at checkout and is confusing. The store mostly sells one-of-a-kind items, but some products have multiple units and some have variants.
Suggestions included paid order-limit apps, hiding the quantity selector for stores where every product is limited to one, and Liquid/JavaScript-based checks using product.variants[0].inventory_quantity for products without variants. Another tested option was adding a max attribute to the quantity input so the selector cannot exceed current inventory, optionally displaying stock quantity with a warning that stock may still sell out before checkout.
The main limitation is that these simple code approaches only cover products without variants; variant-specific stock control would require additional JavaScript or paid customization. No final implementation was confirmed. The store owner is still considering how to handle variant products and shared a possible free Metafields Editor-based customization guide as a reference, though they did not adopt it due to setup complexity.