Keeping the last few units for the people who walk in

One shelf, two ways to sell from it. A customer is standing at your counter holding the last one, and while they find their card a web order takes it. Or the reverse: you keep the shop stocked and the online store spends the week showing things as sold out that are sitting in front of you.

What you want is a number held back for the shop. Shopify does not have one, and the reason is worth understanding before you reach for the workaround everybody is handed.

Shopify counts stock per place, never per channel

Stock in Shopify is a quantity of an item at a location. That is the whole model, in Shopify's own developer documentation: "Inventory levels connect one inventory item to one location." (read 14 October 2026).

A product variant then carries exactly two sellable numbers on the same pages — the total, and "The total sellable quantity of the variant for online channels." Note the plural: one figure covering your online channels together, not a figure per channel. There is no third number, and there is nothing you can set per channel — both of those are totals Shopify works out, not allowances you hand out.

So "five for the shop, the rest online" has nowhere to live.

Losing walk-in sales to web orders? Describe how you want the shelf split and we will build it →

The native answer is a second location, and it is a real answer

If your shop and your stockroom are genuinely separate places, Shopify does solve this, and it says so plainly: "If you have locations that don't fulfill online orders, such as retail-only stores, then their inventory is still counted in your total inventory, but not in your online quantity." And the consequence, in Shopify's words: "The online quantity is what displays to customers in your online store and determines whether a product displays as available."

Turn off "Inventory at this location is available to fulfill online orders" for the shop, and the website stops selling the shop's stock. Free, native, and the right answer for a lot of merchants.

It is also all or nothing, and it is per place rather than per quantity. If you have one shelf that both the till and the website sell from, there is nothing to separate — and a split of "most of it online, a handful for the counter" is not a thing the toggle can express.

The setting that looks like the answer, and what it actually does

Shopify does have a merchant-controlled reserve. Under Unavailable, you can move units out of what is sellable: "Unavailable inventory is on hand, but can't be sold." One of the reasons you can pick is literally Safety stock — "Inventory that's being held in reserve."

It holds the stock back from your till as well. Shopify's own words are that unavailable inventory "can't be sold", with no exception anywhere for a channel — so units in safety stock are not sellable on the website and not sellable at the counter either. Put five aside and your own staff cannot ring them through. That is useful for damaged goods or a quality check; it is not a floor under your website.

Shopify has been building right next to this

This is worth knowing because it tells you which way the platform is going. Shopify shipped channel markets on 17 June 2026, and its changelog describes them as letting you "create a market for one or more sales channels and, optionally, region(s), assign a catalog, and customize pricing, product availability, and currency".

Read that list again: availability, pricing, currency. Three things, repeatedly, and never quantity. Shopify has spent real effort making channels differ in what they offer and has not made them differ in how much stock they have.

What merchants are told to do instead

The request is specific and it is years old:

We'd like to maintain a false floor in Shopify online to reserve a couple of ea SKU for our Shopify POS B&M shop exclusively. … Ex: "SKU Sample-02" has 100 in inventory, but stops selling online at 5 remaining.

— TNDG, 15 March 2022

The one answer it drew was to "adjust all your product inventory down by 5 using the export to excel from Shopify then applying a subtraction function to your variant inventory then upload and overwrite product data" (jenniferj1, 16 March 2022). It is still unsolved.

That is the answer to avoid, and it is worth saying why. It does not hold five back; it tells Shopify you own five fewer than you do. Every number downstream now reads the lie — your reorder points, your stock valuation, your next count, which will find five mysterious extras. And it is not self-maintaining: every delivery resets the problem.

Two years later another merchant asked the same thing, and the reply is the clearest statement of the gap anywhere:

We would like to allocate a portion of our inventory for the webshop. The remaining stock of the product will be made available to customers in our physical store who can pay using the point-of-sale (POS) system. Is this possible, or which app you recommend?

— ariebakker, 4 April 2024

Shopify's own staff answered — recommending Stocky, and "you will want to add a new location that's specific to your POS, so product inventory can be managed accordingly" (Blair, Shopify Staff, 12 April 2024). A quantity question answered with a location, by Shopify. And the app half of that answer has since gone: Stocky stopped working on 31 August 2026.

Which route is yours

What Shopivibe does

You describe the floor in your own words and the shop stops losing races to the website. "When any product drops to five on hand, take it off the online store but keep selling it at the counter, and put it back online when a delivery brings it above eight."

The part worth paying for is that this is built as a threshold rather than a fake number. Your stock stays exactly what it is — the website simply stops being offered the item before your shelf is empty, and starts again when stock arrives. Nothing downstream is lied to, so your counts, your valuations and your reordering all keep working, and nobody has to remember to undo a subtraction after each delivery.

The floor can differ by product, by how fast something sells, or by the one line your regulars always come in for. It asks your store to approve one more Shopify permission on the way — the one that controls where a product is offered — asked for in plain language at the moment you switch the rule on rather than at install, and a person here has it running in your store within 24 hours.

Shopivibe solves the problem in your store and keeps what it adds maintained, including when Shopify changes something underneath. Shopivibe is free during early access, with 3,500 credits included. Credits beyond the included 3,500 cost $0.06 each.

Want the counter to win the last one? Describe your floor in your own words →