Note: This article pertains only to Disco accounts that integrate with Shopify for their products.
For products in your Disco account that are synced with Shopify, there are a few meaningful settings in Shopify that will dictate what we see as the available stock for a product (which dictates whether we show it as in stock or not).
Shopify Features
Of the many settings for products, variants, and inventory in Shopify there are a few key options that are meaningful on the Disco side of things. While Disco does have the ability to see if products and variants are are in stock based on inventory, there are some additional settings that will dictate what that means.
Inventory quantity: Inventory listed for a product and/or variant is the first check. Regardless of other settings, we'll always display products and variants as in stock in Disco when there is stock for those products and variants in your Shopify store.
Inventory Policy: This is the setting that dictates whether products will be able to sell in Shopify despite having zero inventory to be sold. When it's set to continue selling regardless of stock availability we'll consider it in stock in Disco.
Inventory management: For each product and variant there is a field called "inventory management" that denotes what system is used to track the inventory for that variant. For any products that you or variants in which your inventory is not tracked via Shopify we will consider those variants to be in stock, regardless of the stock listed in the non-Shopify system.
What Inventory State Means for your Disco Account
Beyond seeking to provide an accurate representation of your products and variants within Disco, whether a product or variant is displayed as in stock or not has a distinct bearing on whether it is shown in the DiscoFeed or not when you have the "Exclude out of stock products" feature in your DiscoFeed manage page enabled. You can read more on configuring your DiscoFeed via our Setting Up Your Products on Disco help article.
Without enabling that feature, however, the state of inventory for a given product in your store has only a cosmetic effect within Disco.
Inventory Management Overrides
If you are using a system other than Shopify to manage the inventory of your products and variants, or you simply want to not have the state of a product's inventory reflected in your Disco account the option in your account settings under the Toolset heading to select a different inventory management solution. Choosing any non-Shopify option from that list will cause your products and variants to always display as in-stock within Disco.