Backorder products displaying Out of Stock label

Question

My employer has a range of products that we make to order. As such, we don't keep any on hand so our inventory on the Magento 2 backend is always set to 0.

I have lowered the out of stock threshold so that these products can be backordered.

However, we are still facing the issue of the products displaying as 'Out of Stock' on the frontend.

I don't want to write out this feature entirely from our website's code, because we have a large catalog and some products do actually need to display as out of stock.

Is there any way I can hone in on these products or their category so I can exempt them from the 'Out of Stock' label?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Not sure it fits your purpose entirely, but it would be an idea to set these products to not manage stock, that is, the quantity of the stock won't be decreased when orders are placed with those products.

This way, you can reset the initial thresholds and leave the logic untouched so that the other products which do not fit this scenario can act properly with regards to managing the stock and stock status.

Answer 2

I think we have the same problem. However I think the solution you need is to allow Magento to continue showing products as 'in stock' despite stock levels being below zero. You can then set the out of stock threshold to -10000 or some other arbitrary figure. I believe this issue is resolved in later Magento 2 versions, we're using 2.3.0.

Whenever we sell out of a sku the status is set to 'out of stock' and nobody can order or backorder it until we manually change status back to 'In stock'. Take a look at this patch https://github.com/magento/magento2/commit/6f4df9be6a8f2a43b08b3831821d01fe6f1e4c2f

I have to admit I've not tried this yet, I'm waiting for my dev (as usual) to get on with it. I don't trust my own abilities to apply the fix without causing issues.