Stock levels wrong

Hi Chris,

Typically issues like this are caused by a theme or plugin conflict. As a first step, could you try switching back to a default theme like Twenty Seventeen or Storefront and disabling all plugins except for WooCommerce to see if this resolves the stock issue?

Hi John

Thanks, but this standard advice to disable all plugins and switch to the default theme is not helpful. This is a live shop with hundreds of users each day. We can’t basically shut down the store for days. And the problem is only visible after several days, only when we notice that users ordered products that where shown as “in stock” but are long gone.

How else can we test this?

How can a plugin or a theme prevent WooCommerce from SOMETIMES decreasing the stock level after an order was made? I can’t imagine that this is because of some incompatibility.

Best Regards!
Chris

So nobody has an idea why stock levels could suddenly be wrong on some products?

> Thanks, but this standard advice to disable all plugins and switch to the default theme is not helpful.

It is actually the best advice you can get. The alternative is debugging the code plugin by plugin which will cost you a lot more time and money if you are paying a developer. If you aren’t comfortable disabling plugins on a live site for testing, you should have a staging/test site.

Here are some plugins I have seen cause this issue often:

– WooCommerce Poor Mans Swiss Knife (or something like that)
– WooCommerce Germanized (and the family of extensions)

Even if I used a staging server (which I actually have), it would not help.
I would have to do hundreds of test-orders and especially full payments with several payment options to replicate the bug! And then refund all the payments and pay the fees on all those transactions anyway. That does not help at all.

I don’t have these two mentioned extensions.

What I need are suggestions from others that had a similar problem and what the solution was. Maybe it is a plugin (which I doubt) or a special payment option (like bank pre-payment) which does not deduct the stock levels automatically. I know that I am missing / overlooking something. I don’t think it is a problem with a plugin that only changes stocklevels randomly and not on every order.

Thanks!
Chris

Hey Chris,

Well, we’ve seen plugins do this – so you can’t rule it out without knowing.

The most likely culprit is in the payment gateway plugin though.

I found something… On all the orders I see messages in the order annotations like “product X stock level reduced from 5 to 4”.

But these messages are missing when the order way paid with Paypal!

So there is something wrong here. Why are the stock levels not reduced when an order is paid with Paypal?

Best Regards,
Chris

Hey Chris

did you get any further with this? We’re seeing similar symptoms: Paypal payments don’t appear to reduce stock levels but credit card payments do.

Cheers