When a supplier runs out of something, your Wix store should know before your customers do. Wix Stores has good tools for stock you manage yourself: tracked quantities, low-stock labels, back-in-stock requests and pre-orders. What it doesn't have is a way to read your supplier's stock and update your products on its own. This guide is only about stock: how Wix handles inventory, what to decide before you automate it, how to avoid overselling between updates, and what should happen to products the supplier stops sending.
If you also need to keep prices in line, read how to auto-update Wix stock and prices from a supplier feed, which compares the manual CSV round-trip with a scheduled feed sync.
How Wix Stores tracks stock
Wix gives you two inventory methods, and you can choose per product, or per variant once a product has options:
- Track inventory quantity on. You store a number, for example 12. Each sale lowers it automatically, and at zero the product or variant becomes out of stock.
- Track inventory quantity off. You set a status, In Stock or Out of Stock, and sales don't change it. It stays that way until you change it.
Which one you pick decides how much a supplier update can tell your store. If the supplier sends real quantities, tracked quantities let Wix show low stock and stop sales at zero. If the supplier only says “available” or “not available”, a status is all you can honestly show. The Wix Help Center explains both in About Inventory Management.
A few native features only work with tracked quantities: the low-stock message on the product page (it appears when stock drops below 10), the safety-stock level that labels an item Low stock in the Inventory table, and pre-order limits.
What Wix does when a product hits zero
When an item is out of stock, Wix keeps it visible and turns the Add to Cart button grey with the text Out of Stock. You can change that text, not the design. Wix's Help Center confirms there is no setting to hide out-of-stock products automatically, though you can hide products or variants by hand, including many at once with Set Visibility in Store Products.
You have three native ways to keep an out-of-stock product useful:
- Back-in-stock requests. In the Back in Stock Requests tab, start collecting requests and activate the automation. The button changes to Notify When Available, and customers get an email when the item is back.
- Pre-orders. If you track quantities, you can let customers order the item while it is at zero. Only do this when the supplier has confirmed a restock date.
- Hide it. Useful for items that won't come back. Wix warns that a hidden product's URL returns a 404 to Google, which can hurt its ranking, so hiding is better for discontinued items than for short gaps.
Decide these four things before you automate stock
1. Where the stock number comes from
Ask your supplier whether the feed has a quantity field, a status field, or both, and how often it is refreshed. Then look at real values. Many feeds mix numbers with words such as “in stock”, “low”, “on request” or a delivery time like “ships in 4–10 days”. Decide once what each word means for you. Inventing a quantity for a word like “available” is risky: if you turn it into 10, your store may sell 10 items the supplier doesn't have.
2. Whether supplier stock should overwrite your own
With tracked quantities, Wix lowers the number when you make a sale. A supplier update then replaces it with the supplier's figure. That is right for dropshipping, where the supplier's warehouse is the only stock. If you also hold some units yourself, supplier stock and your own stock need to be kept apart, for example as separate products, or you will overwrite your own counts.
3. How much to hold back
Between two updates, the supplier keeps selling to other shops. A stock buffer subtracts a few units from every supplier quantity so you don't sell the last ones twice. A minimum stock rule shows an item as out of stock once the supplier has only a handful left.
| Supplier quantity | Buffer 2 | Minimum stock 3 | Both |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | 18 | 20 | 18 |
| 4 | 2 | 4 | 2 |
| 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
The slower your updates and the faster your supplier sells, the bigger the buffer should be. For fast-moving items on a daily update, a few units is a sensible start; check your refunds for oversold items after a couple of weeks and adjust.
4. What happens when an item disappears from the feed
Suppliers often delete discontinued items from the feed instead of sending zero. Pick one behaviour and stick to it: leave the product as it is, set its stock to zero, or hide it. Leaving it is safest while you are testing. Setting zero is the honest choice for a dropshipping store. Hiding keeps your catalog clean but, as above, costs you the product page in search results.
Also protect yourself from a broken feed. If the supplier's export fails and returns half the usual rows, a careless sync marks hundreds of good products as gone. Whatever tool you use should notice a sudden drop and stop.
Option 1: Update stock by hand with Wix's CSV import
For a small catalog with weekly changes, you can do it without an app. Export your products from Store Products, look up each SKU in the supplier's latest file, write the new quantities into the inventory column and import the file again. Wix's Inventory tab also lets you select several products and change their quantity or status in one go. The step-by-step CSV round-trip is in our Wix stock and price sync guide, and the column rules are in the Wix product import CSV template guide.
The limit is timing. Your stock is only as current as your last import, and the built-in importer has no schedule and doesn't read XML.
Option 2: Update stock automatically from the supplier's feed
If your supplier offers a feed link that always returns current stock, an app can re-read it on a schedule. When you compare apps, check how each one handles the four decisions above, not just whether it “syncs stock”.
Here is how FeedPup for Wix handles them, so you can compare like for like:
- Status words. When the supplier says in stock or low stock without a number, the product stays available and FeedPup doesn't invent a quantity. Only an explicit out of stock makes it unavailable. Words it doesn't recognize are shown to you once during setup, and your choice is used from then on.
- Whether stock updates at all. You choose whether supplier stock updates your store.
- Buffer and minimum stock. Available on Growth and Pro. On Starter, stock follows the supplier one to one.
- Items no longer in the feed. You choose to leave them unchanged, set their stock to zero, or, from Starter, hide them while they are out of stock or missing and show them again when stock returns. Products you hid yourself stay hidden. FeedPup never deletes products.
- Broken feeds. If a feed suddenly has more than 30% fewer products than last time, FeedPup changes nothing and tells you.
- Update frequency. Daily on Starter, every 6 hours on Growth and every 2 hours on Pro. A run with no supplier changes makes no product writes.
The free plan is a test: you can analyse the feed, preview products and import up to 100 as hidden drafts, but it has no scheduled sync. FeedPup asks only for access to products and inventory, never orders, customers or payments. If you need hourly updates or formats like XLS or JSON, compare it with syncX: Stock Sync on the Wix App Market, which lists those.
A safe first week
- Turn on tracked quantities for products where the supplier sends real numbers.
- Run the first sync on a small set and compare five products with the supplier's feed, including one at zero and one with options.
- Start with the safest setting for missing items (leave unchanged) and switch to zero or hide once a few runs look right.
- Turn on back-in-stock requests so customers who find a sold-out item can still leave their email.
- After a week, check orders you had to refund for missing stock. If there are any, raise the buffer or update more often.