Sell Made-to-Order Products When Raw Materials Run Short

A made-to-order apparel store may accept an order today and replenish fabric before production. It needs to choose deliberately whether a material shortage blocks the sale or becomes a backorder that staff must follow up.

Illustrative scenario: The quantities below demonstrate the decision, not a real merchant's order history.

Measure the commitment before allowing sales

One shirt consumes 0.8 meter of fabric. Only 2 meters are currently available. Without a shortage allowance, that fabric supports floor(2 ÷ 0.8) = 2 complete shirts. If the store accepts 4 shirts, the order requires 3.2 meters and creates a 1.2-meter material shortfall, assuming no other activity.

That shortfall is a purchasing or production commitment. It is not physical stock and does not imply that the shirts are ready to ship.

Set the policy in Soply

1. In Raw Materials, bind the Shopify shirt variant to the fabric material and enter 0.8 m as Consumption Per Unit.
2. If the business intentionally accepts orders beyond current materials, enable Allow selling when raw material is insufficient for that binding. Save and review the variant's Backorder status in Product Bindings.
3. Test the intended cart behavior with a quantity above material-based availability. Confirm that the checkout validation settings and the allow-selling policy produce the expected result.
4. After a shortage order, inspect its marker in Oversell orders and arrange replenishment or customer follow-up. Soply can track the material below zero for this workflow.

If the store already has completed shirts, record them as Finished Goods Stock (Pre-produced). That field changes what an order consumes first; it does not increase Soply's material-based Derived Availability. Keep the finished-stock count and the raw-material shortage decision separate.

Use this policy only when the store can manage lead times and customer expectations. See Set up finished goods and backorders, Review oversell orders, and Configure cart and checkout validation.

If finished shirts are already on hand, the ready-made stock case shows how their consumption priority differs from accepting a material shortage.