Inventory
How long your stock will last, which products need reordering, and how the estimate is worked out.
Inventory looks at what you have in stock and how fast it is selling, and tells you roughly how many days each product has left before it runs out.
How the estimate works
We look at the last thirty days of sales and work out how many units a day each product is selling. Stock on hand divided by that daily rate gives you the days remaining.
Recent sales count for more. We weigh the last fortnight twice as heavily as the fortnight before it, so a product that has just taken off shows a shorter runway straight away instead of waiting weeks for the average to catch up.
Returns do not count as sales
If a customer returns a unit, it goes back on your shelf, so we take it back out of the sales figure.
Without that, products with high return rates looked like they were selling faster than they were, and the tool would tell you to reorder stock that was already on its way back to you.
The low stock threshold
By default anything with 10 units or fewer is flagged. You can change that to whatever suits your reorder cycle.
If your supplier takes six weeks, a threshold based on units is less useful than the days-remaining figure. Sort by that instead.
Why a product might be missing or look wrong
No stock number. If you do not track inventory for a product in Shopify, we have nothing to count down from.
Sold nothing in thirty days. With no recent sales there is no rate to work with, so there is no runway to show.
Just launched. A product that has been on sale for three days has a very small amount of history behind its estimate. Treat it as a rough signal, not a forecast.
Related
Still stuck? Send us a message — we reply by email, usually the same day.