Workflow: automated continued selling of products that are ordered at supplier

Shopify Plus

Topic summary

Goal: keep selling out-of-stock variants once supplier purchase is placed, reflect delivery dates, and prevent over-selling incoming inventory.

Needs:

  • Set productVariant.inventoryPolicy to CONTINUE (allows purchases when stock is 0).
  • Update variant.metafields.datepicker.available_from to delivery_date + 2 days.
  • Track incoming inventory via variant.metafields.purchasing.amount_to_receive.

Current Shopify Flow limitations:

  • No action to update a variant’s inventory policy.
  • No trigger that fires specifically on metafield updates. Flow may not fully cover this use case yet.

Workarounds suggested:

  • Use Flow’s “Send HTTP Request” to call Shopify’s API and set the inventory policy programmatically.
  • Use a third‑party automation app (Mesa) to update inventory policy and trigger on product updated; a demo workflow exists.

Roadmap/status:

  • Flow exposes data but not all write-actions; reading vs. setting are distinct efforts.
  • No ETA for a native Flow action to adjust inventory policy.

Open questions:

  • How to add +2 days to a metafield date within Flow.
  • How to allocate incoming inventory to a location/spot to avoid over-selling. Discussion remains unresolved.
Summarized with AI on January 7. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working on a rather complex (for me) Shopify Flow.
The gist of the idea is that we want to continue selling out of stock products on our webshop when a purchase trough our fulfillment software is done. So stock is on its way to our warehouse in a few days and can be ordered trough our shop with the right delivery date added to our shops date picker.

We are currently working on a webhook that sends data from our fulfillment software to Shopify and adds this to several metafields.

One of the things I run into now that I want to change the ‘productVariant.inventoryPolicy’ to be set to CONTINUE based on a check. But I can’t seem to find an action that does this? I can only find it in a check.
Another thing I’d like to know is how a date in a metafield can be updated to be X days above a current date metafield.
At last, I’m looking for a way to add this incoming inventory to an inventory spot (so we don’t over-sell our incoming inventory).

Long story short:

  1. Based on a trigger we want to set inventoryPolicy:continue on a product variant.
  2. Based on date input being mutated in a metafield called variant.metafields.purchasing.delivery_date we would want this to update a metafield called variant.metafields.datepicker.available_from with that date + 2 days.
  3. Based on a numeric input coming from the webhook into variant.metafields.purchasing.amount_to_receive we need some kind of way to add this incoming inventory to an inventory spot (so we don’t over-sell our incoming inventory).
    Hope this helps understanding the challenge a bit more! Feel free to ask questions about the setup.
1 Like
2

Hey @RikGroenland ,

Currently, there is no Flow action available to update the inventory policy on a variant, or a Flow trigger for recognizing an update made to a metafield. Flow wouldn’t be suited to solve this use case at the moment unfortunately.

3

Hopefully appropriate to post here since this isn’t possible with Flow.

We have a 3rd party automation app called mesa that should be able to handle this. This is a recent workflow I built to update inventory policy:

https://www.getmesa.com/blog/shopify-product-variant-inventory-policy-demo/

And we should be able to trigger on a metafield update by triggering on product updated.

4

Hi Tomas,

That is unfortunate. How does the roadmap for Flow look like? Seems to me like an oversight to be able to check a condition but not being able to alter it in an automation app?

5

There’s always ‘an app for that’ :wink:
This does look promising for our usecase. Do you have an overview somewhere as to which actions/triggers are possible to configure as opposed to Shopify Flow?

6

You can set the policy by calling the API with Flow’s Send HTTP Request task.

As for the roadmap, getting a value and setting it are totally different development efforts. Flow effectively gives you access to all of the data, but not yet all of the actions.

7

Thanks for the update. Is it on the roadmap to be able to adjust these inventorypolicy variables as an action?

8

I don’t have a date yet on when we’ll have that particular API covered.