Understanding Stock Availability Messages

You have complete control over what your customers see about the quantity of products you have available. There are several options available:

Hide the Stock Availability column on all pages

Setting the “Show Inventory Availability” option to No will completely hide the Stock Availability column on all pages.

Show the Quantity Available

If you do nothing more than set the “Show Inventory Availability” option to Yes, then each column will show the actual quantity you have Available for the product.

Use Custom Messages based on Quantity Available

You can override the option of showing the actual quantity available by using Stock Availability rules. These rules are set up in the Admin / Manage Stock Status page.

To use the Stock Messages, you set the Low and High quantity and a message to display instead of the actual quantity number. You can also inject the actual quantity into a message (like “Only 3 Left”) by inserting [QTY] where you want to show the quantity. An example of stock rules shows below.

Hide products with an Available Quantity of zero (0).

You can also hide products completely when they are out of stock. This is done by setting the “Show Out Of Stock products in the order list” option to No. This setting can be found on the Admin Options page in the Product Options/Product Display Options section.