Shopify inventory management allows store owners to mark product variants to be allowing checkouts of that product (variant) even when its stock becomes unavailable.
This is an option in a variant’s Inventory Settings section in Shopify admin:
Read More about this in ‣
How to customize this behavior on Inventory Stock Level app
By default, when a product variant’s available quantity hits 0, Inventory Stock Level app will treat this as “Out of stock” and it will display out of stock label with all customizations you applied in the app.
But you can change this behavior with clicking “Customize Continue selling when out of stock behavior” checkbox in Labels and Stock Thresholds section in Inventory Stock Level app’s admin panel:
Now you can either hide the label altogether (first option):
or select “Show static label” option and customize what you want to display in your product detail pages in this scenario.
A 4th label will show in the table above, for the static label in this scenario, that you can enter an in-stock equivalent label (or just copy paste if you want to use the same in-stock label).
This allows store owners to be able to have different labels. For example, here is a common scenario for drop-shipping products:
- If a product has quantity, that’s a product that ships faster, display:
- In Stock - Ships in 1-2 days
- If a product has no quantity, and fulfilled by a 3rd party fulfillment solution, often “Continue selling when out of stock” option is set, so it ships a bit slower, in that case, display:
- In Stock - Ships in 7-10 days
You can also enter different translations for this custom label by clicking translations icon.
ℹ️ Note: If you are using template strings for quantities in your standard labels (i.e: We have %qty% in stock), you should not use template strings in “Continue selling when out of stock” label, because it will always render 0.
How does these options work with multiple-locations enabled
Same rules apply at individual location status. As an example, let’s say you have 2 locations (NY and LA), and one of the location’s inventory quantity becomes zero (NY).
By default, only NY location will be displayed with “out of stock” status label.
Label will render:
- NY: In Stock - Ships in 1-2 days
- LA: Out of Stock
When you enable “Customize Continue selling when out of stock behavior” option with the following configuration with this new capability:
Label will render:
- NY: In Stock - Ships in 1-2 days
- LA: In Stock - Ships in 7-10 days
ℹ️ Note: If you select the location-specific configuration option: “Hide locations if out of stock”; this behavior will be overriden the the new “Continue selling when out of stock” options, and display option you select there will be in effect. Either hiding the label altogether which will remove the “NY” from the list, or the custom label you configure will be displayed if you selected “Show static label” option.