Showing incoming stock dates on your storefront

When a product is out of stock, customers often want to know when it will be back. Stockie can put the expected arrival date from your purchase orders into a Shopify metafield on each variant, so your theme can show a message such as "Back in stock around 14 October".

How it works

You create a Date metafield on variants in Shopify and connect it to Stockie's Earliest incoming ETA field. Stockie fills it with the earliest expected arrival from your open purchase orders and keeps it current as those orders change.

Stockie only fills in the metafield. Your theme decides where the date appears, and whether to show it only when a variant is sold out.

Which dates Stockie publishes

A purchase order sets the date for its variants while it is Ordered or Partially received, has an Estimated arrival date, and still has units to come. Drafts, received and closed orders do not count. Where several orders qualify, the earliest date wins, and every variant on an order shares that order's date.

Orders count at whichever of your Shopify locations they arrive at, including an order sent to a custom address when Receive inventory at is one of your locations.

When nothing is on the way for a variant, Stockie clears the date rather than leaving an old one behind. A late delivery keeps its original estimate until you change the order's Estimated arrival.

Setting it up

1. In Shopify, go to Settings → Metafields and metaobjects → Variants  and add a definition with the Date type, holding a single value. Name it anything you like, for example custom.incoming_eta . It has to be empty, because Stockie will not write into a metafield that already holds values.
2. In Stockie, go to Settings → Integrations  and find the Shopify metafields card. If Stockie does not have permission to update products yet, select Grant access and approve it in Shopify. That is needed once for the whole store.
3. On the Earliest incoming ETA field, select Connect, choose your metafield under Variant metafield, then select Connect and sync.

Stockie then writes a date for every variant with stock on the way. The field shows Syncing while it works, and Connected when it is done.

Keeping dates current

Dates update when a purchase order changes, whether it is marked as ordered, edited, received, closed or reopened, and Stockie re-checks everything in the background. Actions → Sync now runs that check straight away, which is useful after bulk changes.

Stockie treats the metafield as its own, so a value edited or deleted in Shopify is replaced at the next sync.

If the field needs attention

A Needs attention badge means Stockie has stopped writing dates. A message under the field explains why, and Retry starts it again once the cause is sorted. The usual causes are product access being removed, the metafield being deleted or changed to another type in Shopify, or a sync that could not finish.

Stopping or switching metafields

Actions → Disconnect stops publishing and removes every date Stockie wrote, leaving your metafield definition in place. If your theme shows the date, it is worth updating the theme first so customers do not see an empty message. To use a different metafield, disconnect, then connect the new one.

Uninstalling Stockie stops the updates but leaves the dates already written in Shopify, because Stockie loses access at that point. Nothing resumes on its own if you reinstall: you can reconnect the same metafield, or clear the old values and choose another.

Showing the date in your theme

Many Shopify themes can connect a block's text to a metafield through Connect dynamic source in the theme editor, though whether a variant Date metafield is offered there depends on your theme and the block. Otherwise a theme developer can read the metafield for the selected variant and display it, for example only when that variant is out of stock.

Either way, it is worth checking a few variants in a theme preview before publishing, including switching between variants on the product page.