A bestseller that nobody can buy
Your black satin slip skirt was the top seller of the summer, so it still sits first in 'New In' and second on the homepage. Open it and you find XS and XXL. The shopper who wears a 10 clicks, sees 'sold out' on her size, and leaves. Hundreds of people are doing this every day.
Your store's logic only cares whether the product has any stock at all. Two units left means 'available'. It has no idea that the sizes most people wear are gone, and your merchandiser, busy with the next drop, has not had the time to go through every collection by hand.
Why it keeps happening
Shopify collection sorting is usually by best-selling, newest or manual. Best-selling sorts by past sales, which pushes yesterday's hit to the top long after its core sizes are gone. Manual sorting is only as current as the last time someone dragged products around.
- Availability is measured per product, not per size curve.
- Nobody gets told when a style's core sizes sell out.
- Restock decisions happen in a buying meeting, not when the run breaks.
- Leftover end sizes linger because nobody decides to move them.
The cost of a broken run on show
| What the shopper does | What it costs you |
|---|---|
| Clicks, finds no size, leaves | Wasted traffic from ads and email |
| Signs up for a restock alert that never comes | Disappointment and an unsubscribe |
| Assumes the brand is always sold out | Less browsing next visit |
| End sizes never sell | Stock that ends up in a clearance sale much later |
Paid traffic makes it worse. If a best-selling style is in your ads catalogue, you can be paying to send people to a page where their size is gone.
How we fix it
- For each style and colour, we calculate a size availability score based on the sizes that sell most in that range, not a simple count of units. Missing a 10 and 12 matters more than missing an XXS.
- Collections are re-sorted automatically every few hours so styles with a healthy size run come first and broken runs drop down the page. Hand-pinned hero products can stay where you put them.
- Styles whose core sizes have sold out are removed from your ads product feed, or labelled so your campaigns can exclude them, until stock returns.
- A daily email or dashboard lists newly broken runs with sales speed and any incoming stock from open purchase orders.
- For each, your buyer picks an action: reorder, wait for incoming, move the end sizes to a 'last sizes' collection, or mark down. The choice is logged.
- Styles moved to 'last sizes' get their own page, where shoppers who wear an XS or XXL are actually looking.
A normal morning afterwards
The buyer opens the broken runs list with a coffee. Four styles broke yesterday. Two have stock arriving next week, so they are left alone. One goes on the reorder list for the factory call. The fourth moves to 'last sizes' and gets a small markdown. Nobody has to scroll through every collection to find them.
Meanwhile the homepage and 'New In' show products that most shoppers can actually buy, without anyone dragging tiles around.
Where the rules need your judgement
Some brands want a sold-out bestseller to stay visible, because it builds anticipation for a restock or collects waitlist sign-ups. That is a legitimate choice, and the scoring can respect a 'keep visible' flag. Kids' ranges, plus sizes and shoe sizes all have different core sizes, so the score uses the sales curve for each range rather than one rule for all.
Signs broken runs are hurting you
- Top collection tiles often open to sold-out core sizes.
- You re-sort collections by hand when you get the time.
- Ads keep pointing at styles with only end sizes left.
- Leftover XS and XL stock lingers until the end-of-season sale.
- Nobody is alerted when a style's main sizes sell out.