Home › Blog › The variants your low stock alerts can never fire on

You open a product to check stock and there is no number. Where the quantity should be, Shopify says Inventory not tracked.

It looks like a display problem. It is not. It means Shopify is not counting that variant at all, has never counted it and will keep selling it forever.

The part that costs money is not the variant you are looking at. You have found that one. It is the others, because Shopify gives you no way to list them.

What Inventory not tracked actually means

There is a checkbox in every product's Inventory section called Track quantity. When it is off, the variant has no quantity. Not zero. None.

That one difference changes four things at once:

• The variant sells with no limit, whatever is on your shelf
• It cannot appear in an inventory report, because reports rank numbers
• It cannot trigger a low stock alert, because there is nothing to compare against a threshold
• It cannot go negative, so nothing ever looks wrong

The last one is why this survives for years. An oversold variant announces itself: the quantity drops to minus two and somebody notices. An untracked variant is silent by design. The first signal you get is a customer waiting on something you do not have.

It is also set per variant rather than per product. A shirt with five sizes can have tracking on for three of them. The product list shows one line for the shirt and that line looks completely normal.

Why you cannot just look for them

This is the part every other article skips, so it is worth being exact.

Open the Inventory page in your admin and here is what you can filter by: sales channel, product type, vendor, bin name, product tags, then quantity ranges for available, on hand, committed, incoming and unavailable.

There is no filter for tracking status.

The quantity filters cannot rescue you either, because they are the wrong tool by definition. An untracked variant has no quantity, so it does not fall inside a range. It does not fall outside one either. Asking for everything below 5 will never return it. Neither will asking for everything above 5.

So the admin will show you the label on one product at a time while offering you no way to ask which products carry it. On a store with 40 products in 9 sizes, that is 360 variants to open one by one.

That is the real problem here. Not the setting. Finding the setting.

The five minute way to list every one

Use the CSV export. It is the only route that scales.

1. Go to Products, click Export, then choose all products and plain CSV.
2. Open the file in a spreadsheet.
3. Find the column called Variant Inventory Tracker.
4. Filter it for blank cells.

Every blank row is a variant nothing is counting.

That column holds three states rather than two, which is the bit worth understanding:

Anything else means a fulfilment service or a connected app has taken the variant over, so you will see an app handle rather than a word you recognise. That is normal for print on demand and for dropshipping. It is not normal on something you pick and pack yourself.

Run this once and you will usually find two groups: a handful of deliberate ones and a cluster you cannot explain. The cluster almost always shares a single cause.

Where the unexplained ones come from

Four causes account for nearly all of them.

A CSV import. The Variant Inventory Tracker column was blank in the file, so tracking arrived off. One import can do this to a whole catalogue in a second. This is the most common cause by a distance and it is the one that produces the cluster.

A duplicated product. Duplicating copies the setting along with everything else. Duplicate an old preorder or a service listing and the new product inherits it.

An app that used to own it. You uninstalled a dropshipping or fulfilment app. Its variants did not go back to Shopify counting them. They went to nobody counting them.

A product added in a hurry. Somebody created it, priced it, published it, then moved on before ever reaching the Inventory section.

None of those is a merchant deciding not to track something. They are all accidents of process, which is exactly why the list is worth reading before you change anything.

The ones that should stay untracked

Switching it on everywhere is the wrong instinct. For some variants off is the correct setting. Turning it on creates a new problem instead: a quantity that starts at zero and stops the variant selling.

Leave tracking off where there is genuinely nothing to count:

• Digital downloads
• Gift cards
• Services, consultations, repairs
• Made to order pieces where you buy the materials per order
• Print on demand, where your supplier holds the stock

The test is simple. If you cannot walk somewhere and count it, do not ask Shopify to.

Everything else on your list wants tracking on.

Turning it back on without breaking anything

Order matters. Switch tracking on and Shopify starts that variant at zero, which means it stops selling immediately. Do that to fifty products on a Friday afternoon and you have taken half your catalogue off sale for the weekend.

So count first, then switch, then set the number in the same sitting.

For a handful, do it on the product page. For more than about ten, use the bulk editor: Products, select what you want, Edit products, then Columns to add Track quantity and Available. You get a spreadsheet inside the browser where you can tick the box and type the number on the same row.

For a very large catalogue, reimport the CSV you already exported with Variant Inventory Tracker set to shopify and a real number in Variant Inventory Qty. Test it on five rows before you run the whole file.

One thing to check while you are in there. Look at Continue selling when out of stock on the variants you just switched on. Tracking on with that ticked is not much better than tracking off: Shopify counts, then ignores its own count and sells anyway. That pairing causes a particular kind of oversold order, described in why a single channel still oversells.

What this does to your alerts

Here is the reason to care beyond tidiness.

A low stock threshold is a comparison. The alert asks whether the quantity has fallen to the number you chose. An untracked variant has no quantity, so there is nothing to compare, so the answer is never yes.

This is not a limitation of one app. It applies to Shopify's own reporting, to Shopify Flow, to a spreadsheet you keep by hand and to anything else that reads inventory levels. They all read the same field. When that field is empty they all agree that nothing is wrong.

Which makes an untracked variant worse than a variant with no alert on it. A variant with no alert is a gap you know about. An untracked variant sits inside a system you believe is watching everything and quietly is not.

It is the mirror image of a count that has drifted. Drift means your alerts fire against the wrong number. This means they never fire at all. Both end at the packing bench. The untracked one takes longer to find, because nothing about it ever looked broken.

What Shopify does and does not watch on your behalf is worth knowing in full. It is set out in what the native inventory tools cover. If you want the alerting side rather than the settings side, start with low stock alerts on Shopify.

If you only do one thing this week

Export your products to CSV and filter the Variant Inventory Tracker column for blanks. It takes about five minutes and you only have to do it properly once.

Then read the list before you fix it. If it is three digital products, you are done and you have lost nothing. If it is thirty variants across four products you definitely pick and pack yourself, you have probably just found the reason somebody emailed you last month about an order you could not ship.

Put a reminder in for six months from today to run the same export again. Imports and duplicates keep happening. This is the only check that catches them.

Know before a SKU hits zero

Stockwell watches every variant at every location and emails your team when stock falls under the level you set. Install it from the Shopify App Store and the first alert is running in a couple of minutes.

Get it on the Shopify App StoreFree plan covers 50 SKUs with a daily summary. Paid plans add instant alerts and more recipients. No card needed to start.