Shopify inventory tracking: untracked, out of stock, and what to audit
Last updated: 31 July 2026
Shopify has three inventory states that are easy to confuse: tracked with quantity, tracked at zero, and not tracked at all. They behave very differently, and only one of them is usually what you meant.
The three states
- Tracked, quantity above zero — normal. Shopify decrements on each sale.
- Tracked, quantity zero or below — out of stock. Depending on your settings the product either cannot be bought or goes on backorder.
- Not tracked — Shopify does not count it and it can always be bought, forever. Correct for made-to-order items and digital goods; a liability on anything physical you can run out of.
Why untracked inventory is the dangerous one
An untracked physical product cannot go out of stock, so it keeps selling after the last unit ships. You find out from the customer. It is usually not a deliberate choice — it is the default state after certain imports, or a leftover from when the product was a pre-order.
This is the check most worth running periodically, because nothing about the storefront reveals it. The product looks completely normal right up until you oversell it.
Stale out-of-stock products
The opposite problem: products tracked at zero that have sat there for months. They still occupy collection pages and internal search results, and shoppers who click them bounce. Whether that is a problem depends on whether stock is genuinely coming back — a seasonal line returning next quarter is worth keeping; a discontinued item is dead weight that should be archived.
How Catamend handles it
Three separate rules, deliberately kept apart because they call for different responses: untracked_inventory flags physical variants with tracking off, out_of_stock flags tracked variants at or below zero, and low_inventory flags variants under a threshold you can configure per shop.
None are auto-fixable. Turning on tracking without setting a real quantity would make a product unbuyable, and archiving an out-of-stock product might delete a page that is about to be restocked. These are checks that hand you a list, not actions a tool should take on your behalf.
Check your own catalog
Catamend scans every product and variant against 23 checks like this one, ranks what it finds by impact, and applies the safe fixes in one click with a full before-and-after history. Install Catamend from the Shopify App Store.