Automatically Push Down Out-of-Stock Products on Shopify

Sorting that happens the moment stock runs out

Most apps in this category re-sort on a schedule: nightly, or hourly if you pay for it. That's fine until something sells out at 9am in the middle of a promotion and sits at the top of your best collection until the next sync runs. Pushy reacts to Shopify inventory events as they happen, so the product drops the moment it hits zero. An hourly safety sync runs behind that, in case an event ever goes missing.

Real-time sorting is included on every plan, including the free one. Worth checking carefully if you're comparing apps, because elsewhere it's a paid add-on. We wrote up the difference in real-time vs. scheduled out-of-stock sorting.

Sorting that survives page two

Pushy sorts through Shopify's API, so it changes the actual order of the collection instead of rearranging whatever a shopper happens to be looking at. You notice the difference as soon as a collection runs past one page: theme-level sorting can only shuffle the products already loaded, so sold-out items pop straight back up at the top of page two. Because Pushy changes the underlying order, the fix holds across pagination, in the Shopify admin, and in any other app or sales channel that reads that collection.

It also means no theme edits. There's no Liquid to paste and no snippet to maintain, and nothing to re-do when you switch themes. Pushy works with every Shopify theme, custom ones included.

Sold-out products stay on the page

The quickest way to tidy up a collection page is to hide sold-out products, and it's usually the wrong one. Hide a product and you hide its URL, its internal links, and whatever ranking it had earned. Shoppers coming in from search hit a dead end, and you start from scratch when the product comes back.

Pushy never hides, unpublishes, or deletes anything. Sold-out products stay on the page, just further down, which is what Google recommends for items that are only temporarily unavailable. When stock returns, the product goes back where it was. If you'd sooner lead with restocked items, you can send them to the top instead. Either way the order you spent time arranging survives the stockout. More detail in how out-of-stock products affect Shopify SEO.

Keep the products you choose exactly where they are

Automation shouldn't override a decision you made on purpose. Exclude products by tag and they stay put whatever their inventory says, which is what you want for pre-orders, made-to-order pieces, and the hero product you keep at the top of a collection whether or not it's in stock today. You also pick which collections Pushy manages, so anything you curate by hand can be left alone.