How should I manage stock in Shopify as the brand grows?

Start with tracking and locations

Shopify's inventory is the quantity of a product that is available for sale. You manage quantities, transfers and purchase orders from the Shopify admin. You need at least one location to track anything. A location is a place where you store or ship stock: a warehouse, a shop, a spare room, or a fulfillment partner.

My rule: make a location for every place stock physically sits, and no more. If you keep goods in your garage and ship from a third-party warehouse, that is two locations. Shopify tracks inventory separately at each one, and the help center is clear that each location's inventory is independent and cannot be pooled with another's.

When you create a product, it is assigned to all your locations with a starting quantity of 0. A product must be active at one location at least to be sellable. When you add a new location later, existing products are not stocked or activated there. You have to do that on purpose.

How to add inventory to Shopify

1. Go to a product and turn on inventory tracking for it.
2. In the Inventory section, choose the locations and type the quantity at each.
3. For many products at once, use the bulk editor (up to 50 products at a time) or import a CSV file, which is a plain spreadsheet file. Shopify points to CSV for large catalogs of more than 100 products.
4. Check the result on the Inventory page. If a location shows a number under On hand but a dash under Available, the product is inactive there. Open the product, click Edit locations and tick the location. This is a very common trap after a transfer or a CSV import.

Do this setup once, carefully. A wrong starting count is the root of most stock problems later.

Know the five inventory states

Shopify splits every number into states. Reading them correctly saves a lot of confusion:

State	Meaning
Available	Can be sold now
Committed	Set aside for an unfulfilled order, a draft order, or a transfer marked ready to ship
Unavailable	In your location but not for sale: damaged, quality check, or safety stock
Incoming	On its way from a transfer, purchase order or app
On hand	Committed plus Unavailable plus Available

Shopify's own example: 10 jams committed, 6 unavailable and 4 available means 20 on hand. Notice that 20 is not what you can sell. It is 4. People who read the On hand number as their sales number oversell.

Use Unavailable on purpose. Moving damaged items or a safety buffer out of Available is the cleanest way to protect against selling the last few units.

Count stock on a schedule

Shopify has a stock count feature. You choose a location and the products, staff record what is on the shelf (with a barcode scanner or by typing), and a manager reviews before anything changes. Approving a count applies the difference, and each change goes into the adjustment history, so you can see when and why a number moved.

A simple schedule that works for most small brands:

• Top sellers: count monthly, because small errors become stockouts fast.
• Everything else: count a quarter of the range each quarter.
• After any incident (a wrong shipment, a returns pile, a move): count the affected products that week.

Write down the reason for every adjustment. In six months you will want to know why 40 units vanished.

Set reorder points that mean something

A reorder point is the stock level at which you place a new order. The simple formula:

Reorder point = daily sales x supplier lead time in days + safety stock

Worked example, with made-up numbers: a candle sells 6 a day. The supplier takes 14 days to deliver. You want a buffer of 3 days of sales. That is 6 x 14 = 84, plus 18 safety stock, so reorder when available stock falls to 102. If you order 300 at a time, you are reordering about every seven weeks.

Shopify records your purchase orders, which list products, quantities, costs, payment terms and supplier details. You save a draft, mark it Ordered when the supplier confirms, then create an inventory transfer to track the shipment and receive the goods. When you receive it, the incoming units become Available. That order is worth following exactly, because receiving by hand and forgetting to mark it is how phantom stock appears.

Shopify's built-in inventory tools centre on counts, transfers and purchase orders. Shopify's help center also has a guide for migrating from its older Stocky app to these built-in tools. If you want demand forecasts, add an app (see below) or use the approach in inventory forecasting software.

Apps that extend Shopify inventory

App	What it is	Price as of November 2026
Stock Sync (by SyncX)	An app that syncs stock and prices from supplier files, Google Sheets, FTP or a web feed into Shopify	Free plan (up to 2,000 products, one feed, manual updates). Paid plans add scheduling. Check the listing.
Inventory Planner (by Sage)	A planning app that forecasts demand, suggests what to reorder and builds purchase orders	Free to install, pricing by quote
Shopify Marketplace Connect	Shopify's own app that connects Amazon, Walmart, eBay and Target Plus to your store (Walmart and Target Plus are United States only)	First 50 synced marketplace orders a month free, then 1% per extra synced order, capped at $99 a month

Pick one app per job. Shopify warns that you should only have one marketplace connector app connected at a time, to avoid data conflicts.

Numbers to check every month

You do not need ten reports. Use the Inventory page and the adjustment history to check these four things:

1. Low available stock on your best sellers, to feed your reorder list.
2. Slow movers: products with stock but no sales in 90 days, to find cash sitting on a shelf. Your sales reports show this.
3. Adjustments: the history shows when and why each number moved, so repeated losses at one location stand out.
4. Stock value: units on hand times cost. Enter the cost per item on each product so the value can be worked out.

Signs you need more than Shopify

• You sell on Amazon, Walmart or Etsy and spend time fixing numbers that disagree.
• You build products from parts (bundles or kits made from components).
• You have suppliers whose lead times and minimum orders change, and a spreadsheet tracks them.
• You oversell more than once a month.
• Someone on your team spends more than a few hours a week reconciling stock.

At that point, read my guide to inventory management systems, the comparison of multichannel inventory management software, and Amazon FBA inventory management if you use Amazon's warehouses. For plan differences, including what Shopify Plus adds, check Shopify's current plans page; the steps above apply in the standard admin.

How I'd approach this

I would do four things in order. First, clean the start: correct counts, cost on every product, no inactive locations. Second, count top sellers monthly and write down every adjustment. Third, set a reorder point on your twenty best sellers. Fourth, only then add an app, and add one.

A common mistake is buying software before fixing the counts. A planning app forecasting from wrong data just gives you wrong answers faster. If you already sell on several channels and the numbers still drift, the cause is usually a missing step between channels. A quick map of how stock moves in your business shows it. See what AI can do for inventory for the cheap first steps, and I am happy to look at your set-up on a short call.