Handling out of stock orders and products

Whether you’re managing remaining inventory, ordering stock, or redirecting people to your available products, Recharge has options for handling out-of-stock products at different stages of the customer lifecycle. Learn how to hide out-of-stock items, host a presale, and handle sold-out products.

This guide focuses on managing out-of-stock products and on hiding products for timely releases or discontinued product management. Check handling product inventory for more information on inventory settings.

Out of stock orders

Recharge retries charges with an insufficient inventory error 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. Learn more about card declines and order errors.

To view orders with inventory errors, select Customers in the merchant portal and click Order errors from the dropdown. Depending on the original charge date for the order, you may want to manually retry the charge or move the next charge date for the failed order.

Making changes to an out-of-stock order will not automatically retry the order. Recharge can automatically retry the order based on your store settings during the next six-day interval, however, you can also manually retry the order.

Manually retry a charge

You can manually retry the charge in the merchant portal:

1. Select Customers in the merchant portal and click Order errors from the dropdown.
2. Hover over the charge and click the three vertical dot menu.
3. Select Retry charge to manually retry the charge once the item is back in stock.

Alternatively, you can click the Recharge Charge ID number in the Charge errors tab to review charge details. 

On the Charge Details page, you can manually retry or reschedule the charge.

Move the next charge date

Move the next charge date to a later date, scheduling to when the product will be back in stock. If the product's restock date is undetermined, move the charge date to your best estimate of the future date. You can move the charge date to align with the early date for processing orders if the product is back in stock earlier than anticipated.

Out of stock notifications

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

1. In your merchant portal, click Email.
2. Click the Out of stock email under Customer notifications.
3. Click Activate notification.
4. Select Save changes and activate.

See Notifications for more information on setting up notifications.

Communicating with your customers

There are situations that require manually emailing your customers to notify them about out-of-stock products, such as when the product has been removed or when changes are made to their subscriptions. For customized uses outside of Recharge’s Notifications base settings, you could consider utilizing an app or integration that specializes in customer notifications, including Klaviyo V2 with Recharge Quick Actions for example.

You may also want to notify current subscribers about a product that will be out of stock soon. To do this, use the Export Builder to pull the Subscriptions - Active export and gather subscriber information to send notifications outside of Recharge. 

Swap products

Another option when an item is out of stock is to swap your products. Instead of removing or cancelling the out-of-stock product and adding a new one, you can use the swap option to switch to a different subscription product in the meantime. When the original product is back in stock, swap it back. Learn more on adding and swapping products or variants.

How to swap a product

1. Select Customers in your merchant portal and click Customers from the dropdown.
2. Search for and select the customer.
3. Hover over the subscription and click the three vertical dots menu. 
4. Select Swap.
5. Search for and select the new product. Click Next.
6. Enter the product details and click Swap product.

Allow customers to swap products

Update your Customer portal controls to allow customers to Swap products in their subscription. You can also allow customers to choose the date of the next charge for the swapped products by enabling the Edit frequency option under Shipment frequency.

Bulk update a product swap

Recharge can help facilitate a bulk product swap if you need to update the subscription product for more than 50 customers.

See more on bulk updating product and subscriptions.

Hiding out-of-stock items

Use both Recharge Collections and Shopify’s Collections feature to hide your products temporarily from the customer portal and your storefront.

Hiding storefront products with Shopify’s collections

Shopify's Collections can show certain products while excluding others based on keywords. The product needs to be active in Shopify and added in Recharge for the subscription widget to properly preview. Review Shopify's Hiding out of stock products for more details.

Step 1 - Create a collection in Shopify

1. In your Shopify admin, click Products.
2. Select Collections.
3. Click the Create collection button.
• If you use Shopify’s Automated Collections, use the Conditions settings to enter in product-specific keywords.
• Select the specific products if you are using Shopify’s Manual Collections. Make sure to leave out the products you want to keep hidden.
4. Click Save.

Step 2 - Set up visibility for your storefront navigation

1. From your Shopify admin under Sales channels, click Online Store.
2. Select Navigation.
3. In the Menu section, click Main menu or your renamed title for the relevant page.
4. Locate the relevant Menu item and click Edit.

5. In the Link field, change the “All products” option by selecting “Collections” or typing in the newly created collection.

   

6. Click the Apply changes button.
7. Click on Save menu.

See Edit a menu item and Understanding navigation in Shopify for further information.

Host a presale using Recharge Collections

Use Recharge Collections when you need to unveil items with sensitive launch dates, or secret products. Prepare for your sales, promotions, or new product release by creating multiple collections. For the customer portal, exclude the products you need hidden from the actively displayed collection. The benefits for your presale is in creating the collections ahead of time and then making it live on your customer portal when you are ready.

Discontinuing an out-of-stock item

If the out-of-stock product needs to be removed entirely from your storefront, along with existing subscriptions, review how to discontinue subscription products.