Held-back stock
Why it exists
When a refund declines restock on units that never left the building, the units are real and still on the shelf — but the channel is holding them off sale.
Without somewhere to put them, they would flow straight back into Available when the order released them, and Yessort's next availability push would put that number back on the store. The hold the refund asked for would be undone within minutes. So Yessort moves them somewhere they cannot be sold from instead.
See refunds raised in Shopify for which refunds do this.
What it is
A location coded NO-RESTOCK, named "Not restocked (channel)". Yessort
creates it the first time a site needs one, so it appears without anyone
adding it. It accepts stock but is never picked from.
What the move does, and does not do
| Effect | |
|---|---|
| On-hand | Unchanged |
| Available | Down by the quantity held back |
| Value on the books | Unchanged — still at cost |
| Write-off | None |
Nothing has been written off. The units are still yours, still at their cost, sitting in a location that cannot sell them.
When the write-off happens
Only when somebody adjusts the stock out, which posts through the normal adjustment route. Until then the decision is still open — the goods can go back on sale instead. See clear held-back stock and adjust stock.
It is kept out of the shop window
The location is left out of the location codes Yessort publishes to a sales channel, and it cannot be set as a variant's secondary location. Both exist for the same reason: nobody should be sent to a location holding stock that is deliberately not for sale.
Nothing about the NO-RESTOCK name earns it that treatment. The
published codes list pickable locations only, so every location held out of
sale drops out on the same rule — a returns location
awaiting grading, a quarantine bin, a damaged bin, an inbound staging area. The
codes a shopper sees therefore describe exactly the stock the channel is also
being told is available; the two can't disagree.
Where a variant's only stock at a site sits in locations like these, it has no codes to publish, and Yessort clears the field on the channel rather than leaving a stale location behind.
One exception, and it is deliberate: a variant's home and secondary
locations are always listed, pickable or not. Those are the variant's declared
address rather than an observation about where stock happens to be, and a
warehouse that wants a variant found at a given bin should not have that answer
disappear when the bin empties. The eligibility rules keep the held-back
locations out of both anyway — neither a quarantine location nor
NO-RESTOCK can be set as either.
It can go negative
The commonest reason a refund says "do not restock" is that the unit was never really there. So Yessort records the move even when the source location has nothing in it, which leaves a negative figure on purpose rather than silently dropping the instruction. Negative-stock recovery picks those up — see recover negative stock.
Which bucket its stock shows in
Quarantine. It still counts in on-hand — see stock quantities.