Unable to adjust stock from order page

Hello @davidlongftc,

On the front-end of WooCommerce, stock reduction is handled by the payment gateway typically after a successful payment has been made. An order that is set to “on-hold” or “pending payment” would not have the stock level reduced. Ones that are “processing” or “completed” would have stock reduced.

When manually editing an order, you mentioned placing it on-hold to make changes. Any additional items added to the order wouldn’t affect stock until the order status is set to processing or completed. Here are the notes from manually creating an order on my test site just now:

Are you seeing the stock not reduced when you set the order status to “Pending” or “Completed?”

Thanks for the response. To clarify.

When a customer makes an order the stock for the product variation they purchased goes down as normal.
The issue is if a customer wants to change the product ordered for a different variation or an entirely different product we used to be able to select the line item being removed and choose to “Increase stock” to restore that product back in stock for sale to another customer. Now there is no way to do this. The only restock option is if we refund the line item and then there is a checkbox to “restore stock”.

The same issue exists with the new product we are adding to the order to replace the one we removed – we have no way to adjust the stock level for that item as the buttons for increase/decrease stock are missing since the update. See screenshot from previous version of woocommerce: https://www.dropbox.com/s/n5s8soyd1uftbga/woo-355-missing-stock-control-buttons.png?dl=0

We now have an admin nightmare of finding the product, looking through upto 30 pages of variations to find the exact one and manually adjusting the stock number while hoping there is not an order for that item taking place while we are adjusting it.

Have these buttons been moved or is it an oversight. Will they be restored in a future release or do we have to build our own?

Hello @davidlongftc,

Thank you for getting back to me about this. Sorry for the inconvenience this change has brought. The idea behind it was to automate stock updates so that users would not have to do this manually. The reduce stock button was a bit hidden and easy to miss.

The way this is created to work now is that you place an order on-hold to edit. You can add and remove items. You can adjust the quantity ordered. Then when all is set, the order is placed back to processing or completed, the stock would be updated to everyplace it has changed. The intention is to do this automatically so you don’t have to remember to update the stock when editing the order or go edit the product itself.

The stock updating is tied to changing the order status.

There is a GitHub issue about this (https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues/21754). I would read down to Mike Jolley’s lengthy comment to see where things are with this. You can also add your voice to the discussion there. Since this is a feature you relied on, logging your thoughts there helps shape how this goes.

Take care,

Thanks that thread lead to the answer.