Option to hide out of stock products?

[rebelchris]

Hey everyone!

I wanted to know if it's possible to hide all out of stock products from the store front?

[michaelbromley]

Hi Chris!

Good question! Probably the best way to do this right now would be to create a plugin which uses the EventBus to subscribe to the StockMovementEvent. You can then define a function which looks up the current stockOnHand of the associated ProductVariant, and if it is 0, it can set the ProductVariant.enabled to false using ProductVariantService.update()

[rebelchris]

Thanks @michaelbromley that seems to work indeed 🙏
at first I thought it could simply be a on/off flag in a query.

Like only return result that have stock > 0
So on the other hand would it be a risk that people can order stock that's not actually in stock?

[michaelbromley]

There's no built-in support for a simple "on/off" toggle on this right now, mainly because it's just not been requested. I think in most cases, merchants want to keep showing a product even when out of stock, so that customers at least know about it and that they can buy it in future when stock returns.

So on the other hand would it be a risk that people can order stock that's not actually in stock?

By default, if a customer attempts to addItemToOrder when there is insufficient stock, it will fail with a InsufficientStockError. You can also have fine-grained control over this though, by configuring back order support per ProductVariant or globally.

Lastly, another potential option here is to use the ElasticsearchPlugin, which then allows you to customize the search query logic so that it omits out-of-stock results from the returned result set. In this way you can prevent the product showing up in the search & collection list pages, whilst also keeping the actual product page available (not 404 like it would if disabled). This might be the optimal solution actually.