This article explains how to manage your product availability in your Shopify store to prevent customer disappointment. By enabling the "Update stock availability automatically" feature in your Shopify store, you can ensure that your online store reflects the most up-to-date product availability from Gelato's print partners.
Enabling Automatic Stock Updates for Shopify
This feature automatically updates the availability of specific product types in your Shopify store, such as hangers, framed posters, and drinkware. If a product becomes unavailable or out of stock at one of Gelato's printing facilities, the feature will automatically mark the product as unavailable in your Shopify store.
Please note that this feature works for the following products:
Hangers
Framed posters
Drinkware
Apparel
To activate this feature in Shopify, follow these steps:
In your Gelato account, go to "Stores" and locate the store where you want to enable the feature.
Click on the three-dot menu to the right of your store name and select "Edit store details."
Check the box labeled "Update stock availability automatically."
A new menu called "Selling region" will appear. Choose the geographic region where you primarily sell your products.
Once enabled, this feature will instantly synchronize your product availability based on your selected selling region. If a product is out of stock in your specified region, it will be marked as out of stock in your store, even if it's available in other Gelato regions. While global selling is possible, you must still designate a primary selling region for stock management. Currently, you can only choose one selling region, and it's not possible to select multiple regions or none at all.
How Stock Synchronization Works for Shopify
After enabling this feature and selecting your selling region, Gelato will automatically update your product availability every 2 hours.
Here's a breakdown of how it works:
When the product is in stock, the product inventory setting is set to 'Inventory not tracked'. At the same time, all new products, which are in stock, by default are published with the inventory option 'Inventory not tracked'.
Out-of-Stock Products: For any product variant that's temporarily out of stock, Gelato will set the available quantity to zero in your Shopify store. During checkout, the product will display as "sold out," preventing customers from purchasing it. In practice, in such cases, we automatically enable the inventory tracking for a specific product variant and set the number of items to zero (for the Gelato location). We check product availability every 2 hours.
Back-in-Stock Products: When a product is back in stock, we automatically disable the inventory tracking option for the relevant variant. So, we restored the original option 'Inventory not tracked'.
New Products: When adding new products to your store, Gelato automatically marks any out-of-stock variants accordingly.
Important: If you decide to enable inventory tracking manually on Shopify, e.g. to offer a limited sale, please note that the feature is not compatible with your setup and might not work correctly. The idea of this feature is based on changing the inventory status from 'Inventory not tracked' to 'Tracked inventory' back and forth.
FAQs
Q: Why do I see zero inventory for my product in Shopify?
A: If you have enabled the "Update Stock Availability Automatically" feature, this behavior is expected. The item may be temporarily out of stock, and it will automatically switch back to "in stock" once inventory is replenished.
To check if this feature is enabled, follow these steps:
1. Log in to your Gelato dashboard.
2. Navigate to the Store section.
3. Select your store.
4. Go to Settings.
5. Under the Synchronization section, find Update Stock Availability
6. Automatically. If the box is checked, the feature is enabled.