How stockouts affect Shopify demand forecasts

Unavailable stock can suppress recorded sales

A product cannot record ordinary sales in the same way when customers cannot buy it. Treating every zero-sales day as zero demand can understate the next replenishment requirement. The reverse is also important: a quiet day does not prove a stockout.

Record what you know

ReOrder lets a merchant record known stockout periods and makes conservative estimated lost demand visible. Review those dates and the available evidence. The estimate is a planning assumption; it is not a recovered order or a measured lost sale.

Worked example: distinguish the two totals

Illustrative example: a product records 40 sales over 30 days and is known to have been unavailable for five days. A planning estimate may exceed 40 units, but the actual sales remain 40. Label estimated demand separately in any analysis or customer-facing result.

Inspect the purchase that follows

Check whether the adjusted forecast changes urgency or quantity after lead time, inbound stock, supplier constraints and cash allocation. A higher demand estimate need not translate directly into a funded purchase.

• Do not infer unavailable dates solely from zero sales.
• Keep source dates and correction assumptions reviewable.
• Check promotions and unusual orders separately.
• Remove or correct a stockout entry when better evidence becomes available.

In the ReOrder workflow

Shopify does not provide the historical daily inventory position required to identify every past stockout. Record known unavailable dates so ReOrder can correct constrained demand without guessing which dates were out of stock.

This description shares the maintained content used by the in-app Help Center.

Check the plan with your own store

Start with one Shopify store, confirm the inputs and review every recommendation before acting. The current release supports up to 3,000 variants and reads up to 1,000 recent orders, with warnings for incomplete imports.