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Your supplier confirmed the twelfth. On the twelfth they tell you it is now the twenty sixth. You have eleven days of cover left on the variant.

The temptation is to treat this as one problem, solved by finding stock somewhere. Sometimes that works. More often, finding stock is the slowest of the four decisions in front of you and while you chase it the other three quietly run out of time.

Here is the order that costs least.

First: find out whether it is actually one SKU

Before anything else, check whether the delayed shipment covers variants you are treating separately.

A single late container is often eight or nine SKUs. Merchants routinely deal with the one that triggered the email while the other eight run down quietly in the background. The variant that sent you the alert is rarely the most urgent one in the shipment. It is just the one with the tightest threshold.

This takes two minutes and it changes what every other decision applies to. Do it first, because if you get the list wrong then everything after it is wrong too.

Second: decide what happens at zero, while you still have a choice

This is the decision with the earliest real deadline and it is the one almost everyone leaves until the shelf is actually empty.

You have three options and they are not equally reversible.

You can let it sell out and show the sold out badge. Cheapest to do, worst for the listing. On Shopify a variant that sells out and stays that way slides down your collection sorting and your search results and it does not get that place straight back when the stock returns.

You can keep selling and accept a longer dispatch time, with the delay written plainly on the product page. That holds the listing and its ranking, at the cost of more support emails and more cancellations. It only works if you actually print the shipping date. A silent backorder is a chargeback with a delay on it.

You can pull the variant from the front of the store but keep the URL live. This protects the customer experience without deleting the page, which matters because deleting a product page throws away whatever search equity it had.

Whichever you pick, pick it before you hit zero. All three are far easier to set up with 11 days of stock left than with none. The middle one especially is almost impossible to introduce cleanly once customers are already seeing a sold out badge.

Third: protect the variants that are not late

The overlooked one.

When a shipment slips, most merchants respond by reordering the late items hard. That is reasonable. It also eats attention and cash at exactly the moment the rest of the catalog still needs both.

What goes wrong is a second stockout three weeks later on something completely unrelated, caused by a reorder nobody placed because everyone was busy with the first fire. If you have alerts running, this is cheap to avoid: read the rest of the low stock list once today and order anything that is close. If you do not, this is the week you find that out.

Fourth and last: chase the stock

Chasing the stock is genuinely the least urgent of the four, which feels wrong because it is the part that feels like the actual problem.

It goes last because how it turns out is mostly not up to you and the deadline belongs to your supplier rather than to you. The first three decisions all have deadlines you set and consequences you own. Spending day one on the only part you cannot control is how the other three slip.

When you do get to it, there are only three useful questions. Can they ship any part of the order now. Can you air freight a part order covering just your best selling variant. Do they have a different colorway or size run sitting in stock. A part shipment of your fastest selling variant is very often possible and almost never offered, because suppliers ship complete orders by default.

The thing to change afterwards

Once it has resolved, resist the urge to treat it as bad luck.

A missed date tells you something about that supplier. If it is the second one this year, the delivery time you plan around is wrong. The fix is not a sterner email. It is to plan around the time they actually take rather than the one they quote, which means a higher threshold on everything they supply.

That is a one line change to make and it converts this incident into the reason the next one does not happen.

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.