Replenishment

How to read Shopify's days of inventory remaining when you import

The report answers how long the shelf lasts. An importer needs a different number, the day the next order has to go in, and the gap between the two is the whole journey.

Marcus VolstedCo-founder, Restocio Published 27 October 202612 min read

Every source on this page was opened and read, and each one is dated in the Sources section at the foot.

Shopify's days of inventory remaining is a variant's stock divided by average daily sales over the last 28 days, in the Inventory remaining per product report. It says how long the shelf lasts, not when to order: stock on its way and the weeks a new order takes are not in it. If you import, order when it falls to supplier days plus travel days plus cushion: 130 for a 30-day factory run, a 70-day boat and 30 spare days.

Every Shopify fact below comes from Shopify's own Help Center and developer docs, read on 25 October 2026, and where those pages are silent, this one says so. How many days of stock to hold in the first place has its own page, and why the order date matters more than the stock level is argued on the replenishment page. This one reads the report.

Where is days of inventory remaining in Shopify, and on which plans?

It sits in one of Shopify's default inventory reports. The table lists each variant with its title, SKU, ending quantity, quantity sold per day and days of inventory remaining. A chart in the same report counts how many variants are “predicted to run out of stock soon (0 days remaining)” and how many have more, in groups from 0 to 30 days up to 91 and over, according to Shopify's inventory reports page.

You do not need a bigger plan to see it. Shopify's Basic plan page says that plan “comes with access to all reports”, and the Grow plan page names inventory reports among its own. The history is shorter than the plan suggests, though. The inventory reports page says historical data for inventory-based metrics “go back only to October 1, 2023.”

How does Shopify calculate days of inventory remaining?

Ending quantity divided by the average sold per day. The report's description says that average “is calculated based on its sales over the last 28 days.” The column definition words it differently, as units sold in the selected time period “divided by the number of days that the product variant was active during that time period”. Active is not defined, so whether a sold-out day counts in that divisor is not something you can read off the page.

The edge cases are where the figure misleads, and the page is exact about them.

What happened to the variant	What the report shows	What that hides from a reorder
No sales in the period	N/A, “as we don't have sufficient data to make a prediction”	A best seller that has been empty the whole period also sold nothing, so it reads N/A beside the products nobody wants
Ending quantity below zero, because it kept selling while empty	0	The units customers have already paid for, which you owe on top of the next order
Sold out for part of the period	Not described	If empty days count as days with no demand, the rate comes out low and the days figure high, on the product that just proved it sells
Stock already on its way	Not part of the formula	A container landing next week and no order at all look the same

Over time the third row costs the most, because a low rate makes the next order smaller and the next stockout sooner. That loop is worked through on the replenishment page and is not repeated here.

Why did days of inventory remaining jump in October 2026?

Shopify changed which stock it counts. In the inventory reports page's words, “Starting October 1, 2026, inventory reports measure stock by On hand quantity instead of Available quantity.” It goes on: “On hand includes every unit at a location, including Committed and Unavailable units, so reported quantities can be higher than before.” Shopify's inventory states page describes committed units as those “set aside and can't be sold”, and unavailable ones as “set aside by apps or held for other reasons”.

So the figure now includes stock that is already promised. Take an example with round numbers: a variant with 300 units on hand, 60 of them on orders not yet shipped, selling 3 a day. Counted on the 240 you can still sell, it has 80 days. Since October the report shows 100. Nothing sells any differently, and the 20 extra days are goods that belong to customers who have paid. The gap is widest on the products with the most unshipped orders, which are rarely the ones you can afford to misjudge.

Older numbers stay as they were, since “Data before October 1, 2026 still displays Available quantity”. A chart that spans the date steps up at the start of October with no change in what you sold.

Why is days of inventory remaining too late for an importer?

Because it answers how long, and an importer needs to know by when. A shelf that lasts 130 days sounds like four comfortable months. Whether it is depends on everything that has to happen before the next delivery can be sold, and the report holds none of it: the days your supplier needs before the goods ship, the days they travel, and the stock you want left when they land in case the boat runs late.

Here is that same 130 days with a 70-day boat and 30 days of stock wanted on arrival, with only the factory changing. These three cases are pinned in Restocio's own deadline tests.

Days of inventory remaining	Days the supplier needs before shipping	Days left to place the order
130	0, finished stock	30
130	30	0, order today
130	45	−15, the order is 15 days late

The report shows the same number on all three rows. On the last one, a boat order placed today lands with 15 days of stock left instead of the 30 you wanted, so half the cushion is spent before anything has gone wrong. The arithmetic behind the right-hand column, and how to size the cushion, is on the replenishment page. What counts as the supplier's days is on the lead time page.

Stock already on its way is the other half the report leaves out. Shopify keeps it as Incoming, from transfers or apps, and its inventory states page says it joins On hand only “when incoming inventory is received”. Until then, a variant with 40 days left and a container landing in 25 reads the same as one with nothing coming. Read cold, both look like an emergency. What Incoming does and does not count is covered on the incoming inventory page.

Which Shopify inventory reports help you reorder?

The inventory reports page describes nine. Read as tools for a purchase order, a few of them help and the rest serve the books.

Report	What it shows, per Shopify	What it does for a reorder
Inventory remaining per product	Days each variant's stock lasts, on a 28-day average	Cover today. The starting point, never the date
Inventory sold daily by product	Average sold per day, “quantity sold divided by number of days in the time period”	A rate over every day in the period, sold-out days included, and it does not reflect returns, manual adjustments or transfer receipts
Products by sell-through rate	Units sold divided by units sold plus units still in stock, over the most recent 30 days, usually about two days behind	Whether a delivery is moving. Sell-through has its own page
Products by percentage sold	Share of the starting quantity sold in the period, N/A when it started at 0	The same question over a period you pick
ABC product analysis	A grade by share of revenue, 80, 15 and 5 per cent, with cost left out and a timeframe you cannot change	Which products to check first. Where the letters stop helping is its own page
Month-end inventory snapshot and month-end inventory value	Units on hand at each month's end, and their cost	The books, not the order
Inventory adjustment changes and inventory adjustments by count	Every change to stock, and where it came from	Checking the count after a delivery, as on why the count is wrong after a delivery

None of the nine has a column for lead time or for stock on its way, so each of them stops where the days figure stops.

How do you turn the report into an order date by hand?

Days until you must order = days of inventory remaining − (days the supplier needs before shipping + travel days + days of stock you want left on arrival)

Export the report, add that sum as a column per supplier and route, and anything at zero or below is due. Then fix the rows the report gets wrong before you trust any of them.

Start with anything that sold out in the last four weeks. Redo its rate over the days it was actually on the shelf, which means keeping your own note of when it was empty, because none of these reports records it. Next, take every variant with an order on the water. If the delivery lands before the days figure runs out, the shelf holds and you add the delivery's units divided by the daily rate to the days left. If it lands after, the difference is how many days the shelf will stand empty.

After that, read every N/A with an ending quantity of zero as a question, since it may be the product you most need. And if a lot of your orders wait before they ship, take the units on unshipped orders off the ending quantity, since the October figure includes them. Done weekly for twenty products, that is a short job. For a few hundred, every step of it multiplies.

How does Restocio work out days left?

Restocio does the same division with those corrections already made, then turns the result into a date. Here it is beside Shopify's report.

	Shopify, Inventory remaining per product	Restocio, days left
Stock it counts	On hand since 1 October 2026, committed and unavailable units included	What Shopify's own API calls “the total sellable quantity of the variant”
Sales period	The last 28 days	60 days unless you change Sales period the pace is measured over, or a younger product's own age
Days the shelf was empty	Not described	Left out of the rate when Restocio recorded the shelf at zero
No sales in the period	N/A	An empty product that sold within the last year borrows its pace from before it went empty, with a warning to check it yourself. A stocked one with no sales says No sales yet
Your shop's growth	Not counted	With Count my shop's growth into every order on, as it is unless you switch it off, the pace can include the shop's measured growth, and when it does the card marks it (estimate)
Stock on its way	Not in the figure	Each delivery checked against the shelf, in the Incoming (PO) column on Replenishment
The order date	Not shown	An Order by date on every product on Replenishment

The empty days are the row that most often makes the two numbers disagree, so the card says so rather than leaving you to wonder why Restocio's pace is higher than Shopify's. An info icon beside Avg. sales reads, for a product that sold out on three days, “3 sold-out days are left out of this average, so it shows what the product sells while in stock”, followed by the rate counting them.

Each product on Replenishment shows Stock lasts, its days left in whole days, and an Order by date: the last day to order so the main route lands with the cushion you set, the store's or that supplier's own, still on the shelf, counting the supplier's production and handling days, its own routes and travel days if you typed them on its card, and the days that supplier usually runs late. How to read the Replenishment page goes through every column.

The same table holds the column Shopify's report is missing. Incoming (PO) shows the units on open purchase orders with their expected date, and when a delivery lands after the shelf is empty it adds a red line, “Lands N days after you run out”. Take the product from earlier with 40 days left. With its container landing in 25 days, the cell shows the units and the date and nothing more. If the container were landing in 55 days instead, it would read “Lands 15 days after you run out”.

If you would rather read the date than build it in a spreadsheet each week, Restocio puts one on every product from your own Shopify sales, at $149 a month for up to 500 products or $299 a month for any number. See the plans.

Where Restocio's days left can be wrong too

Leaving out empty days only works for the days Restocio saw. It keeps its own daily stock record from the day you connect your store, and every day before that counts as an ordinary selling day. A product that sat empty for a month before you installed is measured as slower than it is, just as Shopify's figure would measure it, until that month drops out of the sales period.

Stock on its way has a catch of its own. Restocio reads your stock and your sales from Shopify, but not Shopify's purchase orders or transfers, so a delivery appears under Incoming (PO) only once the order is in Restocio's Purchase Orders. An order raised only in the Shopify admin is invisible to it, and the column shows a dash.

Common questions

What does N/A mean in Shopify's days of inventory remaining?

The variant sold nothing in the period, so there is no daily rate to divide by. Shopify's Help Center says the value is set to N/A because there is not enough data to make a prediction. Check the ending quantity before you skip it. At zero, the N/A may be a product that sells well and has simply been empty all month.

Why did Shopify's days of inventory remaining go up in October 2026?

From 1 October 2026, Shopify's inventory reports count On hand stock instead of Available, and On hand includes committed units on orders not yet shipped and unavailable units set aside. The figure rises by those units divided by the daily rate, with no change in sales. Data from before 1 October still shows Available, so a chart across the date steps up.

Does days of inventory remaining include incoming stock?

No. It divides the stock at your locations by the daily sales rate, and Shopify counts incoming units from transfers or apps in On hand only once they are received. A variant with a container landing next week reads the same as one with nothing ordered, so check your open orders against the days figure before you buy more.

Which Shopify plan has the days of inventory remaining report?

Shopify's Basic plan page, read on 25 October 2026, says the plan comes with access to all reports, and the Grow plan page lists inventory reports by name, so you do not need Advanced or Plus for it. The data behind inventory-based metrics goes back to 1 October 2023 at the earliest.

At what days of inventory remaining should I reorder?

When it falls to the days your supplier needs before shipping, plus the travel days, plus the days of stock you want left when the goods land. With a 70-day boat and 30 spare days, finished stock is due at 100 days remaining and a product with a 30-day factory run at 130. A supplier who delivers in a week, with a few spare days, is due at about 10.

Sources

Every source below was opened and read on the date shown against it. Rules, rates and schedules change, so check the current page before you act on a number that matters. If anything here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.

Shopify Help Center, Inventory reports (Inventory remaining per product, the 1 October 2026 On hand change, and the other inventory reports) (read 25 October 2026)
Shopify Help Center, Understanding inventory states (Committed, Unavailable, Incoming, On hand) (read 25 October 2026)
Shopify Help Center, Basic plan (reports row) (read 25 October 2026)
Shopify Help Center, Grow plan (reports row) (read 25 October 2026)
Shopify developer docs, ProductVariant object, inventoryQuantity field (Admin GraphQL API 2026-10) (read 25 October 2026)

Marcus Volsted

Co-founder, Restocio

Marcus co-founded Restocio and works on it daily with a Swedish importer who plans their purchasing in it every working day. Restocio is built in Sweden by two founders, one Swedish and one Danish, and Marcus is the Danish one. Why we are building it.