FAQ & Troubleshooting

This section answers some common questions and provides insight into issues that new users of Attribute Stock might run into.

All of my products are out of stock

This can happen when you have one or more attribute stock items with 0 stock that are configured incorrectly to match products or attributes too broadly.

For example, it might specify an attribute but not a term (causing it to match any term), or it might be missing a product filter. Another common mistake is specifying multiple attributes in different match rule groups, where they should be inside the same group (e.g. size and color).

If you have a lot of stock items, it can be easier to spot misconfigured items if you export your attribute stock to CSV and open it in a spreadsheet editor. You can export your stock items from the Attribute Stock screen.

A specific product has the wrong stock value

The first thing to do is go to Products ▹ Attribute Stock and filter the list by selecting the specific product in the Product field and clicking Filter. This will show you all stock items matching that product and may allow you to spot items that are matching it incorrectly due to a misconfiguration.

If there are no stock items matching incorrectly, the next thing to check is the product itself. In most cases stock management should be disabled and stock status set to "In stock" at the product level and on all variations.

Product stock and attribute stock can co-exist, so it's important to disable product stock if you want to manage stock levels via attribute stock exclusively.

I want to allow/disallow backorders

WooCommerce doesn't allow you to set backorders on a product that doesn't have stock management enabled. There are 3 ways around this, depending on your needs:

1. Use the Allow backorders setting under Products ▹ Attribute Stock ▹ Settings to allow backorders for ALL products using attribute stock.
2. Use the Allow backorders setting on individual attribute stock items to allow/disallow backorders for ALL products using the stock item.
3. Enable stock management on the product, set an extremely high quantity such as 999999999, and allow backorders.
4. Add a custom code snippet to your site to selectively allow backorders on products. Feel free to contact us for help with this if needed.

Greyed out or disabled product options aren't working

If you've enabled hiding or greying out out-of-stock product options but it's not working properly, it's most likely due to the infamous WooCommerce "Ajax variation threshold".

If your product has too many variations, WooCommerce will resort to using an asynchronous request to check if a variation is in stock only after all attribute options have been selected. To grey out or hide out of stock options, this needs to be known before selection.

To allow this, you simply need to increase the Ajax variation threshold to a number higher than the amount of variations your product has. You can set this under Products ▹ Attribute Stock ▹ Settings.

My waitlist / back in stock notifier plugin isn't notifying

All waitlist and back in stock notifier plugins require that a specific product variation ID is stored, which is then checked later to see if it's back in stock yet. Therefore if you're using "Any" variations (that is, where "Any" is selected instead of specific attributes) it will cause issues because there's no variation ID to match the exact attributes that were selected by the customer.

The only solution is to specify all of your product variations explicitly and not use "Any" variations.