When you install Stock Control, the app immediately starts pulling your Shopify data so the dashboard is useful from day one. Nothing needs to be configured manually — the backfill runs in the background.
What Gets Synced on Install
Three things are pulled from your Shopify store in order:
Products and variants — every tracked variant becomes a row in Stock Control
Inventory levels — on-hand, available, and committed quantities for each variant at each location
Sales (90 days) — the order history used to calculate velocity, days of stock, and dead stock
Untracked variants (listing-only products with inventory tracking turned off in Shopify) and archived products are excluded from inventory counts and KPIs. That’s by design — they would otherwise show as “out of stock” forever.
How Long It Takes
For small catalogs (a few hundred variants) the initial sync finishes in a couple of minutes. Larger stores with thousands of variants or a full 90 days of high-volume sales can take 15–30 minutes. The dashboard is usable immediately, but some values (velocity, days of stock, dead stock) stay empty until the sales backfill completes.
Choosing Your Forecasting Mode
Go to Settings > Forecasting to pick how reorder points are calculated:
Basic mode — a fixed 7-day reorder threshold for every variant. Simple, no supplier data required.
Advanced mode — reorder point = lead time + safety stock, with a cascade from per-variant supplier overrides down to account defaults. Set account-wide defaults here too.
Start with Basic. Move to Advanced once you’ve added suppliers and want per-variant accuracy.
Verifying the Sync Worked
Once the backfill has run, check the dashboard:
Tracked SKUs should match the number of tracked variants in your Shopify admin
Inventory Value should be non-zero (unless you haven’t set costs in Shopify)
Sales (30d) should show a realistic order volume
If any of these look wrong, see the Dashboard Numbers Look Wrong troubleshooting article.
Ongoing Sync
After the initial backfill, Stock Control stays in sync with your Shopify store automatically via webhooks. New orders, inventory changes, product edits, and new variants are picked up in real time — no manual refresh needed.