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How to track stock levels, set low-stock alerts, manage backorders, and keep your WooCommerce inventory accurate.

WooCommerce can track exactly how many units you have in stock, warn you when you are running low, and automatically mark items as unavailable when they sell out. This guide shows you how to use those features.

Quick summary

You can turn on stock management for each product individually, or for your whole store. Once enabled, WooCommerce tracks quantities, shows "Out of stock" when items sell out, and can send you low-stock email alerts. You can also allow backorders if you want customers to keep purchasing even when stock is zero.

What you'll need

A WooCommerce product already created
Your current stock quantity for each product

Enabling inventory tracking store-wide

Before managing stock on individual products, make sure stock management is turned on in your store settings.

Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Products.

Open the Inventory section. It's the Inventory link in the row of sub-sections at the top of the Products settings screen.

Tick "Enable stock management." This turns on inventory counts across your whole store.

Set the low stock and out of stock thresholds. The low stock threshold starts at 2. Change it to whatever makes sense for your business — for example, if you re-order when you have 10 left, set the threshold to 10.

Check the notification settings. All three — "Enable low stock notifications," "Enable out of stock notifications" and "Enable backorder notifications" — are ticked by default, so untick any alert you don't want. The addresses that receive them go in the "Notification recipient(s)" field, separated by commas; it starts out as your WordPress admin email.

Click Save changes.

Enabling stock tracking on an individual product

Even with store-wide tracking on, you opt each product in to tracking individually.

Open the product for editing (Products → All Products → click the product).

Go to the Inventory tab inside the Product data panel.

Check "Track stock quantity for this product."

Enter the current stock quantity in the Quantity field.

Choose the out-of-stock behavior. Under "Allow backorders?", choose:

Do not allow — stops purchases when stock hits zero
Allow, but notify customer — lets customers buy, and shows a backorder notice on the product page, in the cart and checkout, on the order, and in the customer's emails
Allow — lets customers buy, and it looks no different to them than an in-stock item

Click Update to save.

Updating stock quantities

You will need to update quantities when new stock arrives, or when you make adjustments.

Open the product, go to the Inventory tab in Product data, and change the Quantity field. Click Update to save.

Managing stock for variable products

For variable products (ones with sizes or colors), you can track stock at the variation level.

In the Variations tab of Product data, open a variation and tick Manage stock? for that variation. Enter the quantity for each variation separately, then click Save changes. This is useful when, for example, you have 5 blue shirts in size M but only 2 in size L.

Parent level, variation level, or a mix

You can track stock on the parent product, on individual variations, or both. Any variation with Manage stock? ticked keeps its own count; variations without it draw on the parent product's quantity. So a shared pool for most variations plus a separate count for one unusual variation is a supported setup, not a mistake.

Stock status vs stock quantity

There are two ways to control availability:

Stock quantity tracking — WooCommerce counts units and handles availability automatically
Stock status — you manually set the product to "In stock," "Out of stock," or "On backorder"

If you do not need precise quantity tracking (for example, you sell services), you can set the status manually rather than tracking a number. Find this in the Inventory tab — the Stock status setting appears when Stock management is not ticked.

Common questions

A customer bought something I no longer had in stock — how did that happen?

Most likely, stock tracking was not enabled for that product, or it was set to allow backorders. Check the Inventory tab on that product and make sure tracking is on and backorders are set to "Do not allow" if you want to prevent this.

I sold a product in person (not through the website) — how do I update the stock?

Open the product, go to the Inventory tab, and manually reduce the quantity by the number sold. Or use the Quick Edit option from the product list.

Can I hide out-of-stock products from my store automatically?

Yes. Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Inventory and tick "Hide out of stock items from the catalog" under Out of stock visibility. On a variable product, this can also hide out-of-stock variations from the dropdowns, but only for variations that track their own stock and have backorders turned off. If you track stock on the parent product instead, or you allow backorders, every variation still shows.

Can I get a report of all my current stock levels?

Yes. Go to Analytics → Stock (Analytics is its own menu in the sidebar, not a WooCommerce submenu). The report lists products and variations with their stock status and quantity, and the Show menu filters it by out of stock, low stock, in stock or on backorder.

Need a hand?

If you're stuck, email support@chykalophia.com and we'll help. Include your website address and a screenshot if you can.

Managing stock & inventory