Shopify inventory changed by itself? How to find out who or what changed it

Where Shopify shows who changed your inventory

Shopify keeps an adjustment history for every tracked product and variant. To open it, as described in the Shopify Help Center:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Products.
2. Click the product.
3. If the product has variants, click the variant.
4. In the Inventory section, make sure Inventory tracked is on.
5. Click View adjustment history.

Each row shows the date, the activity, Created by (the staff member, app or sales channel that made the change) and how each quantity moved: Unavailable, Committed, Available, On hand and Incoming. Each quantity shows the change first and the new total second.

Two limits matter when you are hunting for a change: the history covers the last 180 days, and you see one product or variant at a time. For changes across the store, or older than 180 days, the Help Center points to the Inventory adjustment changes report, which can be filtered by SKU, location, staff member, app and reason. Shopify's changelog of 18 July 2025 says these reports keep history beyond 180 days on a go-forward basis, in the new Shopify Analytics.

How to read what you find

The Activity column tells you how the quantity was changed. When someone sets a new quantity, they can choose a reason: Inventory correction, Inventory manually counted, Inventory received, Items restocked, Damaged, Theft or loss or Promotion or donation. When they choose none, the history shows Manually adjusted.

Shopify also records its own system activities, such as Data correction, Transfer created, Removed from location and reservations being created, updated or deleted. Stock on an open order shows as Committed, so a drop in Available with a matching rise in Committed is an order, not a loss.

The usual causes of a change nobody remembers

• An app or integration that sets quantities. Marketplace syncs, supplier feeds, wholesale platforms and other inventory systems write stock under their own name. In Shopify Community threads, merchants have traced unexplained changes to an integration, for example stock that rose only on orders coming through one wholesale marketplace.
• A bulk import or bulk edit. A spreadsheet with an old column of quantities overwrites hundreds of items in a minute. The history shows the same name and the same minute on every item.
• A quantity typed over. Someone sets 24 where the shelf held 30, often without a reason, so the history shows Manually adjusted.
• Returns and refunds with restock. A refund that restocks puts units back, which looks like stock appearing from nowhere if nobody checked the item back in.
• Transfers and receiving. Stock received or moved at the wrong location makes one location short and another over.

Merchants describe the same thing in their own words on the Shopify Community: quantities that change randomly, stock that resets to zero and counts that increase on their own. In each case the answer is in the Created by column of the items that changed.

Why it is still hard to fix

• Finding the few bad changes among the many good ones. A store's history is mostly sales, which are correct. The changes that matter, with no sale, transfer, purchase order or count behind them, are a handful among thousands.
• One item at a time. The adjustment history opens per product or variant, and a bad import touches hundreds.
• Putting it back without erasing sales. If an import set an item to 40 and 3 have sold since, typing the old number back would hide those 3 sales from your stock. Each item needs its own sum.
• Knowing what it cost. The history counts units. What the missing stock is worth at cost is a separate calculation.

How Stockproof finds and reverses it

We built Stockproof for exactly this. It reads the same inventory history and does the work above for the whole store:

• Every change with nothing behind it, and only those: edits, imports, app changes and quantities typed in as counts, with no sale, transfer, purchase order or count behind them. Stock received with no purchase order is shown apart, because it is usually a real delivery.
• Valued at cost, with who made it: the staff member or app behind each change, grouped into batches so one import is one line, not three hundred.
• Undo that keeps sales: a batch is put back item by item, and the sales made since are kept. When a batch is more than a day old and its items have changed since, Stockproof offers a count first instead of an undo.
• Stock Guard for next time: a batch of changes with nothing behind it that matches your rules is flagged within hours, so a bad import is caught the same day.

The Free plan flags unexplained changes at one location and runs full stocktakes there. Undo and Stock Guard come with the paid plans, which have a 14-day free trial.