Auto Hide Out-of-Stock Shopify Products with Airtable
In Shopify, Online Store publishing controls whether a product appears on the storefront. A product published to the Online Store channel is visible to shoppers. A product removed from that channel is hidden.
Shopify does not unpublish products when they run out of stock. Stores end up watching inventory by hand or installing a paid app to keep out-of-stock items off the storefront.
AirPower maps the Online Store channel to an Airtable checkbox column. The checkbox can be a formula that reads inventory. When stock is positive the product stays published. When stock hits zero the product is hidden. When stock returns the product is published again.
Sync inventory into Airtable
This workflow needs current inventory in Airtable.
Set up a Shopify to Airtable sync that imports inventory onto your Variants table. See Sync Shopify product inventory with Airtable for the inventory setup.
Create the formula column
Add a formula column on your Products table. Have it return a truthy value when the product has stock and a falsy value when it does not.
IF(Inventory > 0, 1, 0)
Replace Inventory with the column that holds the product’s available quantity. The formula returns 1 when stock is positive and 0 when stock is zero.
Map the formula to the Online Store channel
- Open the sync
- Go to Data & fields
- Click Products
- Select the Airtable table
- Open the Publishing pane
- Toggle Enabled on Online Store
- Select the formula column as its Airtable column
- Click Save sync
What you’ll see after saving
On the next Airtable to Shopify sync, AirPower reads the formula value for each product.
Products with zero stock are unpublished from the Online Store and disappear from the storefront. Products with stock are published. As inventory changes in Airtable, the formula updates and the next sync brings Shopify into line.