Handling product inventory
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 related to your bundle type for more information:
Access your inventory settings
Manage how Recharge handles orders based on product inventory in your settings:
- Click Settings in the Recharge merchant portal.
- Select Edit next to Order Processing.
- Use the How should Recharge check and reduce inventory for each order drop-down menu under Order processing to specify how Recharge should handle orders based on product inventory set in your ecommerce platform.
- Click Save to update your settings.
Recharge inventory settings
Inventory setting |
Behavior |
|
Create order always (and reduce inventory) |
Recharge always creates the order, even if there is no available product inventory in Shopify. For example, if the inventory is set to 0 and a customer orders 10 items, the inventory would be reflected as -10 in Shopify. |
|
Create order only if inventory is available (and reduce inventory)
Note: This setting is compatible with partial order fulfillment.
|
Recharge only creates the order if your Shopify’s product inventory settings allow it. Order behavior depends on your inventory settings for each product in Shopify. See the chart below for a detailed explanation. |
Shopify-billed orders
While Recharge creates the recurring orders based on the store-level setting, the variant-level settings you set in Shopify also play an important role. Shopify’s inventory settings affect how Recharge creates customers’ orders. Review the following chart to understand how Shopify’s inventory settings affect Recharge’s order creation behavior.
Shopify inventory settings
This behavior applies to orders containing subscription products. Recharge does not check inventory for one-time products or free gifts by default. However, orders for these items are only processed if inventory is available in Shopify or if the product is set to Continue selling when out of stock.
|
Shopify setting |
Recharge behavior |
|
If you enable the option to track quantity and continue selling when out of stock |
Recharge creates the order, even if the product is out of stock. |
|
If you enable the option to track quantity, but disable the option to continue selling when out of stock This does not apply if you enable the Recharge setting to Create order always (and reduce inventory) |
Recharge does not create the order and marks it with an insufficient inventory error. |
|
If you disable the option to track quantity |
Recharge always creates the order, regardless of inventory levels. |
Recharge-billed orders
For Recharge-billed orders, Recharge only creates the order if there is available inventory in Shopify or BigCommerce. The order is marked with an inventory error if inventory is unavailable. This applies if you use BigCommerce, or are on the migrated Shopify Checkout Integration and still have Recharge-billed orders.
See how to determine if an order is billed by Shopify or Recharge 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.
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.
You can view orders with inventory errors in Recharge:
- Select the Customers tab in your Recharge merchant portal and click Orders errors.
- Click the Inventory tab to review orders with inventory errors.
- To manually retry the charge once the item is back in stock, click the three dots next to the order and select Retry charge. Otherwise, Recharge automatically retries these charges.
Out-of-stock notifications
You can set up automated email alerts to notify customers when their order is out of stock.
- Click Settings and select Notifications from your merchant portal.
- Click the Out-of-stock email under Customer notifications.
- Under Status, click the toggle to enable the notification.
See Notifications for more information on setting up notifications.
Location-specific inventory
Recharge checks inventory levels at the variant level and submits an order to Shopify if inventory is available. However, if stock is unavailable at the designated location, Shopify may reject the order with an inventory error.
Partial order fulfillment is incompatible with location-specific inventory.
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.
