Overview:
Managing inventory for subscription products is crucial to ensuring that your recurring orders are processed correctly. In Shopify, inventory is automatically checked during the billing attempt process for subscription products. This article explains how inventory works for your subscription products and what actions you need to take to ensure smooth billing.
How Inventory Works for Subscription Products:
The product’s inventory is checked during each billing attempt for subscription products. It ensures that you are not charging customers for products that are unavailable.
If inventory is available (greater than 1), the billing attempt will be processed.
If the product’s inventory is below 1 (out of stock), the billing attempt will fail, and an "INSUFFICIENT_INVENTORY" error will be returned, meaning the subscription contract cannot be fulfilled due to a lack of available stock.
How to Prevent Billing Errors for Out-of-Stock Products:
If you do not track the inventory of a subscription product, your billing attempts will be processed regardless of the inventory level of your product.
If you need to track the inventory and want your subscription contracts to be processed even when a product is out of stock, you need to enable the "Continue selling when out of stock" option for your subscription products on Shopify. Here’s how to enable this setting:
From your Shopify admin, go to Products.
Click the name of the subscription product that you want to track.
If the product has variants, then click the variant that you want to track.
In the Inventory section, check Track quantity.
If you want to allow customers to purchase the item when it's out of stock, then check Continue selling when out of stock.
By enabling this option, recurring orders will be processed regardless of the inventory level, even if the product is out of stock.
If you prefer to only process billing attempts when inventory is available, no action is required. Shopify will automatically check inventory, and orders will only be processed if stock is sufficient. If the product is out of stock, the order will fail with an "INSUFFICIENT_INVENTORY" error.
What happens if I have multiple products in one contract, and one has inventory while the other doesn’t?
If one product in a subscription contract has inventory and another does not, the same thing will happen: the billing attempt will fail. All products in the contract must have sufficient inventory for the billing attempt to be processed successfully. If any product is out of stock, the entire contract will fail, and you will receive an "INSUFFICIENT_INVENTORY" error.