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Product inventory tracking

It is important to keep your inventory accurate. Accurate inventory allows you to avoid selling more products than you actually have and helps remind you to replenish your stock before you run out. You can include a stock quantity for every product in your store and it will be automatically reduced when customers place orders from your store. Once the quantity of a certain product reaches zero, it will receive an “Out of stock” label and become unavailable for purchase. You can also choose to receive an email notification when a product quantity gets low to help you remember to restock.

On higher pricing plans you can also manage stock levels for product options, like colors and sizes, if you create product variations in your store. Every product variation can be tracked. For example, a size L, or a Yellow XL, can have its own SKU and quantity, so its stock can be tracked.

Enabling inventory tracking for products

When you add new products to your store, they have an unlimited quantity by default. “Unlimited” means that the product is always available for purchase. Since the product quantity will never reach zero, the product will never show as “Out of stock.” This setting works well for services and digital products.

However, if you sell tangible products that you either receive from a supplier or produce yourself, you may need to track the product inventory. Turning on stock tracking will let you know how many units of a product you have available for sale and when it’s time to restock.

To enable stock tracking you should specify how many units of each product you have in stock. When customers place orders for a product (and the order payment status is either Awaiting Payment or Paid) the product’s stock gets automatically reduced by the number of units ordered. Once that product’s stock reaches zero, it is labelled as “Out of stock” and can’t be added to a user’s cart. Besides, your store checks products in shoppers’ carts against the inventory to help you prevent overselling when several customers are about to order the same products whose quantity is limited.

If you change the payment status for an order from Awaiting Payment/Paid to Cancelled/Refunded, the quantity of the products from that order will be automatically returned to their stock.

To set quantity in stock for a product via desktop:

  1. From your store admin, go to Catalog > Products.
  2. Open the product you want to edit.
  3. Find the Stock Control block on the right:

  1. Click Manage.
  2. Enter the number of items you have in stock:

  1. Specify the product quantity at which you want to receive low-stock notifications:

  1. Save the changes.

To set quantity in stock for a product via iOS or Android app:

If you set up and manage your store via the mobile app for iOS or Android, follow these steps to enable inventory tracking for a product:

  1. Open the mobile app on your mobile device.
  2. Tap Products.
  3. Tap the product you want to edit.
  4. Tap Stock Control.
  5. Enable stock control to track inventory.
  6. Specify the Quantity of the product you currently have in stock.
  7. (optional) Specify the quantity for the Notify when stock reaches option if you want to receive low-stock notifications for this product.
You can also track the stock levels of a product by its options like color and size (for example a Yellow XL). To track a product’s stock by size, color, etc., you will need to create variations for your available product options and specify the SKU and stock quantity for each variation.

Hiding Out of Stock products

We mark products with a zero quantity as “Out of Stock” and hides the “Buy Now” and “Add to Cart” buttons for out of stock products so they can’t be ordered:

You can choose whether to display or hide out-of-stock products in your storefront. To hide out of stock products from customers, enable the corresponding option in your store admin > Settings > General > Cart & Checkout:

Hiding Out of Stock products

We mark products with a zero quantity as “Out of Stock” and hides the “Buy Now” and “Add to Cart” buttons for out of stock products so they can’t be ordered:

Choose whether to display or hide out-of-stock products in your storefront. To hide out of stock products from customers, enable the corresponding option in your store admin > Settings > General > Cart & Checkout:

Adding a quantity field to product pages

If your customers tend to order many units of the same product, or you offer quantity discounts, you can add a quantity box to your product pages.

To display the quantity field on product pages:

  1. From your store admin, go to Design.
  2. Scroll down to Sidebar.
  3. Find the “Add to Bag” button menu.
  4. Place a checkmark next to the Product quantity button:

If you use a store plugin on a WordPress site, you should edit the product page layout by using the store design settings inside that site builder.

Removing the “In Stock” label

If you want to hide the “In Stock” label on the product pages:

  1. From your store admin, go to Design.
  2. Scroll down to Sidebar and find the “Add to Bag” button section:

  1. Uncheck the box next to Stock availability labels (and Number of items in stock if you also wish to hide that information).
If you use a store plugin on a WordPress site, you should edit the product page layout by using the store design settings inside that sitebuilder.

Low stock notifications

To know when it’s time to replenish a product’s stock, you can opt into receiving an automated message from your store informing you that a product’s stock has reached a certain limit.

Simply enter the low stock value at which you would like to receive a notification, and the store will automatically send you an email when your product reaches this limit:

  1. From your store admin, go to Catalog > Products.
  2. Open the product you want to edit.
  3. Scroll to the Stock Control block.
  4. Click Manage.
  1. Enter the number of items left in stock at which you want to receive the Low Stock notice:

  1. Save the changes.
The low stock notifications will be sent to the email address that you specified in your store admin in Settings > Mail.
 
To stop receiving emails about low product stock, you can disable the Low Stock Notification in your store admin in Settings > Mail (this setting affects all products). To remove low stock notifications for just a certain product, go to that product’s page, select the stock control block, and set a zero value in the “Send me a note when the quantity in stock reaches” section.
 

If necessary, you can customize the low stock notification. See our article about editing message templates in your store.