Managing Out of Stock Products in Subscriptions

Managing subscriptions with out of stock products requires careful planning to minimize customer frustration and maintain loyalty.

In this article, you’ll learn how to manage subscriptions that include out of stock products.

How it works

Products are considered out of stock when Shopify shows 0 or negative items available. When orders contain out of stock items, you have the option to automatically process the order anyway, partially deliver the order, or skip the entire order.

Any orders that contain out of stock products will be labeled in the customer timeline, subscription order history, customer portal, and tagged in Shopify. 

Before a billing attempt is made, we check for any out of stock products in the subscription. However, shipping is not affected by out of stock items, as shipping rates are calculated before checking inventory availability.  

Orders with out of stock items will be not be merged. For more details, see Merging subscription orders.

Out of stock settings

You have three options for how to handle orders that contain out of stock items:

Process order anyway

By default, subscription orders are processed regardless of stock. This means customers will be charged, and the order will be marked as processed. Customers won't be notified of any changes to their order.

Partially deliver order

Customers will only receive and be charged for items that are in stock.

If every item in the order is out of stock, or if the order is part of a prepaid subscription, the entire order will be skipped even if "partially deliver order" is selected.

Skip entire order

If an order contains at least one out of stock item, the customer's entire order will be skipped until the next delivery date.

If a one-time product is included in the skipped order, it will be included in the next order instead.

Managing out of stock orders

To determine how to handle out of stock orders:

1. In your Yotpo Subscriptions main menu, go to Settings > Out of stock management.
2. Select whether you want to process the order anyway, partially deliver the order, or skip the entire order.

Next steps

You can also receive daily notifications about orders affected by out of stock items by going to Settings > Out of stock management and toggling on Receive daily reports.