Synchronize inventory
Inventory synchronization keeps your store's product availability up-to-date with what's in our warehouses. It enables you to view real-time inventory levels from your store and to automatically hide out-of-stock products from customers.
This guide provides strategies and practices to help you manage inventory updates effectively.
[Shopify] Deactivate inventory sync for specific products
Understanding inventory sync
When the inventory sync is active, Bigblue pushes real-time updates to your store for every stock movement. For example, fulfilling an order decreases your available stock, receiving a return or offloading an inbound shipment increases your available sock, etc.
The inventory can also be adjusted by the warehouse performing quantity and quality control.
For Shopify and BigCommerce, on top of real-time updates for stock movements, Bigblue regularly runs a complete check of your store’s inventory figures and updates those that do not match, for example following a manual update on your store.
Inventory sync activation
To ensure an efficient inventory sync, these are two preliminary steps to complete:
- Create your Bigblue products, either manually or in batch via a csv import
- Link your products and activate those links, either manually or automatically
When you're ready to sync inventory from Bigblue to your store, navigate to Shop Integrations, select your store to open the associated settings, and switch on Synchronize inventory.
Activating the inventory sync will trigger stock updates for all your store products that are linked to a Bigblue product or bundle. Hence, if you don’t have any stock at the warehouse yet, switching on the inventory sync will push your store inventory to zero.
[Shopify] Deactivate inventory sync for specific products
By default, when inventory sync is enabled, Bigblue automatically updates stock levels for all your store products linked to a Bigblue product or bundle. However, if you have specific items you'd like to exclude from these updates, we’ve made it easy for you to deactivate inventory sync at the product level on Shopify.
🙋🏾 When should I use this? For preorders with a limited quantity of items available. For example, if your products have already been manufactured but haven't yet arrived at the warehouse, this allows you to start selling while still capping the available quantity.
- In Shopify Settings > Custom data > Products, add a metafield with the button Add definition. For namespace and key, choose
bigblue.disable_inventory_syncand for type, True or false
Note that this operation can only be done at the product level, not at the variant level.
- From the Shopify product page, you can now disable inventory sync on the product (or on all of its variants) by switching this metafield to True
If you have any special cases that are not described above, please contact our Care team.