Shopify Inventory Management: A How-to Guide

Maintaining accurate inventory status is crucial to ensure products are available for customers to order and to track which items are committed to existing orders or incoming shipments. Accurate stock quantities (or inventory levels) also allow sellers to adjust their store's inventory based on factors like best-selling or seasonal products. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be equipped to handle Shopify inventory management tasks, including tracking and adjusting inventory quantities in your store.

Understanding inventory states in your store

The products in your store are assigned one of five possible inventory states to help you manage your inventory:

• On hand includes all inventory you have at a location, which factors in all committed, unavailable, and available inventory.

• Available inventory isn’t yet committed to an order and is readily available for you to sell.

• Committed inventory includes all units that are part of a purchased yet still unfulfilled order.

• Unavailable inventory refers to in-stock units that are reserved for a draft order or unavailable for purchase.

• Incoming inventory is stock that’s on its way to your shop or warehouse and is not yet available for sale.

How to track product inventory in Shopify

To get an inventory count for all of your products, visit the Products page in your Shopify admin, which will provide an inventory count for all the variations of each product offered in your store. You can also go to the Inventory page and use search filters to count and sort your inventory by specific criteria.

How to adjust inventory quantities for products with variants

Follow these steps to make any adjustments to the different variants of your inventory quantities:

1. Go to Products > Inventory page 

2. Adjust On hand or Available quantities

3. Update quantities of specific variants

4. Save your inventory adjustments

Here’s a look at these steps in greater detail:

1. Access the inventory page.

From your Shopify admin, visit the Products page, where you can then select the Inventory page. You can select a specific location from the drop-down menu if you have multiple locations.

2. Find the product you’re looking to adjust inventory for.

Search or filter your way through the list of products until you find the correct one. You can adjust the on-hand or Available quantities of one or more variants of the same product.

3. Adjust one or more variants.

If you wish to adjust a single product variant, enter the quantity you want to adjust in either the On hand or Available column. If you’re adjusting multiple variants, you can adjust them by the same amount. First, select the different variants you want to edit, then click Update quantities.

4. Save your inventory adjustments.

To save your inventory adjustments, simply click Save. 

Adjusting inventory quantities without variants

For products without variants, you can adjust inventory quantities by visiting the Products page from your Shopify admin and selecting the product to update. From the Inventory section, click either Available or On hand. To adjust the quantity, enter the number by which you are increasing your existing inventory quantity under Adjust by. If you’re subtracting from your current inventory, use a negative number instead. Finalize your adjustments by clicking Save.

Other considerations

You can keep track of your inventory adjustments over the last 90 days. However, if a product has multiple variants, you won’t be able to view the history for each one simultaneously; you’ll only be able to view the inventory adjustment history for each individual variant. Here are the steps to view your inventory adjustment history.

1. Go to Products from the Shopify admin and select the product's name.

2. If the product has variants, select Edit next to the variant.

3. From the Inventory section, select Adjustment history.

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