Inventory is set and managed in your ecommerce platform directly, but you must determine how Recharge interacts with your store's inventory settings.

This guide provides an overview of Recharge's inventory settings and instructions for handling out of stock orders.

Before you start

Bundles have unique inventory rules and behave differently from standard inventory settings. Refer to the considerations section for the bundle type you're using for more information. 

Shopify Checkout Integration

Inventory behavior settings 

Adjust your inventory settings

By default, Recharge does not check for inventory of one-time products added to a subscription order. To enable this setting on your store, reach out to support or your account manager.

If your products are set on Shopify to Do not track inventory, the setting on Recharge should be configured as Create order always to avoid checking for inventory. Shopify product level settings can override your settings in Recharge. If a product in Shopify is set to Continue selling when out of stock, the Recharge setting Create order only if inventory is available will not prevent orders from being created if that product is out of stock.

To adjust your inventory settings: 

1. Click Settings and select Order processing from your merchant portal.
2. Under Order Processing, select the desired inventory behavior for recurring orders.
3. Click Save
   

Migrated Shopify Checkout Integration

For merchants on the Migrated Shopify Checkout Integration, how you handle product inventory will differ based on the subscriber's initial subscription date and whether they are an existing subscriber or new subscriber. See Customer management on the Migrated Shopify Checkout Integration platform for more information.

For new subscribers who checked out on the Shopify Checkout Integration, inventory is managed within Shopify. See the Shopify Checkout Integration section above for expected behavior. 

For pre-existing subscribers, their subscriptions will follow the inventory behavior settings outlined below.

Inventory behavior settings 

Adjust your inventory settings

1. Click Settings and select Order Processing from the merchant portal.
2. Under Order processing, select the desired inventory behavior for recurring orders
3. Click Save.

See Shopify's guide on Understanding inventory management for more information.

Recharge Checkout on BigCommerce

Recharge only creates the subscription order if there is available inventory in BigCommerce. If the inventory is not available, the order is marked with an inventory charge error.

BigCommerce Checkout Integration

For initial orders, BigCommerce monitors and applies inventory settings in the native checkout.

For recurring orders, Recharge creates the subscription order only if there is available inventory in BigCommerce. The order is marked with an inventory charge error if the inventory is unavailable.

Out of stock orders

Recharge retries orders that are out of stock daily for up to 60 days. After 60 days, Recharge leaves the charge in an insufficient inventory state, making it easier to locate and reschedule these charges once inventory is available. 60 days is the automatic recovery period set by default. Contact the Recharge support team if you wish to change the automatic recovery period.

To view orders with inventory errors, click on the Orders page in the Recharge merchant portal, and view the Charge errors tab.

To manually retry the charge once the item is back in stock, click the three dots next to the order in the Errors tab and select Retry charge.

Out of stock notifications

You can set up automated email alerts to notify customers when their order is out of stock.

1. Click Settings and select Notifications from your merchant portal.
2. Click the Out of stock email under Customer notifications.
3. Under Status, click the toggle to enable the notification. 

See Notifications for more information on setting up notifications.

Partial order fulfillment

Partial order fulfillment improves out of stock inventory handling and reduces the number of orders that result in an inventory error state. The partial order fulfillment settings work by removing out of stock line items from an order and automatically retrying the order.

For more information and opt-in instructions, see Partial order fulfillment.