we just completed a stocktake of all of our inventory to remove any items that were oversold or items that were undersold. The trouble that we’ve run into is some of our products Have the same barcode, but different variants, did not get corrected. Not sure why Shopify created a barcode that was all the same for each of the different variances on some items. And when we did the “complete stock take” none of those items were correct. It would remove a random one from stock, for example, we had a size 8 shoe still available it randomly removed a size 6 the first on the list. And some of the items were not removed because it seemed to not know which item to remove. We’ve been in business 10 years and we just noticed through this stock. Also noticed that few of our items from different vendors have the same barcode. As these barcodes are generated through Shopify we’re not sure how this happened. And now we have to manually look up anything with multi same barcodes, find actual inventory in store, see which items are actually in stock and correct it. Its a bit of a nightmare. These “same barcode items” did not show up in “missed” report or in the “inventory “ report. As these barcodes are generated through Shopify were not sure how this happened. We have 10,000 items in the store we just manually scanned and not doing that again. Also when we completed our stock take, it didn’t say “step 1 remove all inventory first” from the missed list, and then complete stocktake. We thought we could remove the missed items after. But not so. When complete it did not remove them and we had to manually remove those items. Anyone else??? Stocky should have a better guided flow that insists that you remove or acknowledge missed items before being allowed to do the stock adjustment.
Topic summary
Inventory reconciliation problems after a full stocktake: multiple products share identical barcodes, including different variants of the same product and items from different vendors. The poster says these barcodes were generated via Shopify, leading to ambiguous matches during stock adjustments.
Impact observed:
- Stocktake removed or adjusted the wrong variant (e.g., removed size 6 when size 8 was the one scanned/available) and sometimes failed to remove any item because it could not disambiguate.
- Items with duplicate barcodes did not appear in the “missed” report (items not scanned) or the general inventory report, making cleanup difficult.
- After completing stocktake, “missed” items were not auto-removed, forcing manual corrections across a catalog of ~10,000 items.
Process concern: The stocktake flow (Stocky, Shopify’s inventory app) did not require acknowledging/removing “missed” items before finalizing, which contributed to errors.
Requested improvement: A guided flow that enforces handling “missed” items prior to stock adjustment.
Status: Unresolved. Root cause of duplicate barcodes and a scalable fix were not identified in the discussion.