Storefront Availability Debugger
The Opportunity
An app that scans newly created products for storefront availability issues and flags why items appear sold out despite being active. It helps merchants quickly identify catalog, inventory, market, or variant-level misconfigurations before customers see broken product availability.
"Merchants can create products that look available in admin/API but still appear sold out on the storefront, especially for newly created products. The root cause is hard to diagnose because it can involve inventory, markets, product status, publishing, or variant/cart availability logic."
Market Validation
Detailed Analysis
Proposed Solution
Provide an automated diagnostic dashboard that checks product visibility across channels, markets, catalogs, inventory locations, variant IDs, and storefront/cart behavior, then explains the most likely blocker and recommended fix. Include alerts for newly created products that fail availability checks.
Target Audience
Shopify merchants, store operators, and e-commerce managers who manage product catalogs and inventory
Competitive Landscape
Shopify Flow for alerts, custom theme/debugging apps, catalog/inventory audit tools, but few focused storefront-availability diagnostic apps
Implementation Notes
Use the Shopify Admin API and Storefront API to audit product, variant, inventory item, location, publication, and market/catalog status; run cart permalink tests and storefront availability checks; generate human-readable diagnostics and alerts; cache results and trigger webhooks when newly created products fail validation.
Evidence from Merchants
Real quotes from Shopify community forums
"10 products I created recently all show as 'sold out' on the storefront and cannot be added to cart."
"It looks like, for any product/variant created after a certain date, the inventory item is not being correctly written or linked at the backend."
"When I try to create a new variant on one of these products, the available quantity stays at 0 and cannot be set to 1."
"Has anyone seen this? Is this an account-level inventory bug that Shopify staff would need to fix from the backend?"
"The issue affects all languages/markets (FR, EN, JP)."
Key Pain Points
Newly created products show as sold out and cannot be added to cart.
criticalMentioned by 1 merchants
Impact: Loss of sales due to products being incorrectly marked as unavailable.
Market Metrics
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