How to Track Inventory by Options or Products on BigCommerce

(00:01)
Hey there! Are you a BigCommerce user and want to track your inventory? In this video, I’m going to show you how to do that. Now, before we get started, my name is Cal. I’m a developer, a store owner, and I also run the Ecommerce Growth Community, which is a free private community for people like you and me doing ecommerce—whether you’re on BigCommerce or not, it doesn’t really matter.
Every week, I post more ecommerce-related videos, so if you find this one useful, subscribe and hit the bell!
(00:30)
Alright, let’s get started! I’m going to share my screen and we’re going to talk about BigCommerce inventory. I’m logged into a store, and I’ve set up a test shirt. You can see it here on the front end of my site—it just says “Test Shirt” and it’s priced at $1. It doesn’t say anything about inventory yet, so let’s set that up.
We’ll go into the inventory tab. If you’re on the new product UI, you’ll see the tabs here. On the old UI, you’ll see them across the top, but the process is similar.
(01:03)
Click Inventory, then check Track Inventory. Now it asks: Do we want to track inventory at the product or variant level? Since I don’t have variants set up yet, I’ll leave it at the product level and set my stock to 10.
Now, on the front end, if I refresh, you can see that I can add a few to the cart. But if I try to add 11, it tells me there isn’t enough stock—so it’s tracking the inventory.
(01:33)
What happens if I set the inventory to zero? On the product page, the Add to Cart button disappears, meaning there’s none available. There’s no message saying “out of stock,” it just removes the button.
(02:19)
Let’s look at some additional settings under Advanced Settings → Inventory.
Here you can choose:
Do nothing when a product is out of stock,
Hide the product completely, which gives a 404 or forbidden error when accessing the product page, or
Hide the product but leave the page accessible, allowing users to see the product but not purchase it.
You can also choose to redirect to the category page if someone tries to access an out-of-stock product.
(03:55)
Now, let’s look at options for when a product option is out of stock. You can:
Hide the option,
Mark it out of stock, or
Do nothing.
(04:25)
There are other settings like Automatically adjusting stock levels when editing an order, which helps keep things accurate when canceling or refunding orders.
(05:03)
Now let’s add some variations to our test shirt. I’ll scroll down to the Variations tab, add a size option with small, medium, and large. BigCommerce automatically generates SKUs for each size.
Since we’re tracking by variant now, we’ll switch to track inventory at the variant level. When I save, you’ll see a column for each variant’s stock level. Currently, all variants are set to zero.
(06:50)
Tracking at the variant level is important because sizes are different products, so if someone orders a large, you can’t give them a small.
Now that we have variants, you can see the Add to Cart button doesn’t appear if all sizes are sold out. But if I set small to 5, the button shows up when I select “small.”
(07:23)
If I select medium or large, which are still out of stock, it gives me the message, “Currently unavailable.” The Add to Cart button is deactivated, showing a “Ghostbusters” symbol.
(08:07)
Let’s check the Advanced Settings → Inventory again.
When an option is out of stock, you can:
Do nothing,
Mark it as out of stock (with a strike-through), or
Hide the option entirely.
(09:23)
Here’s what happens when we mark the option out of stock—it gets a diagonal strike-through, signaling it’s unavailable. If we choose to hide the option, it disappears entirely from the product page, leaving only the in-stock options visible.
(10:40)
A quick note: if you have product filters set up, out-of-stock options won’t show up when filtering by size, for example. This makes the shopping experience smoother for your customers.

Summary:
In this video, we covered:
How to turn inventory tracking on in BigCommerce,
The difference between product-based and variant-based inventory,
The various ways BigCommerce handles out-of-stock products and options, and
How to adjust inventory settings to suit your store’s needs.
(12:02)
If you found this helpful, hit the Like button, and don’t forget to join our community of store owners at JoinEcommerceGrowth.com. If you need a developer, reach out to us at Epic Design Labs.