Exclude items and cap quantities

Everstock gives you three controls for stopping a supplier feed from touching stock you do not want it to touch: an ignore list, a stock buffer, and a quantity cap. All three live on the connection detail page in the Approval & exclusions section, and edits there save through the Shopify admin save bar.

Exclude items with the ignore list

Ignore list (optional) takes comma-separated supplier SKUs or barcodes to exclude from sync. The placeholder shows the format: e.g. SKU-123, 0123456789012. The field exists only on the connection detail page, so an ignore list is something you add after the connection is created.

Ignored records are dropped the moment the feed is read, before any matching, comparison or write happens. That applies to Preview changes and to Sync now alike, so an ignored item can never turn up as a proposed change and never appears in the run's Per-record audit. The run's Fetched count still includes it, because Fetched counts every record the supplier returned.

Matching is exact. A record is dropped when its SKU or its barcode is exactly one of the values you listed, so case and any spaces inside a value matter. sku-123 will not exclude SKU-123. Everstock does trim the spaces around each comma for you, so SKU-123, SKU-456 and SKU-123,SKU-456 are the same list.

Ignoring an item changes later runs only. It does not undo a quantity an earlier run already wrote, so if you want the old number back, set it in Shopify yourself.

You don't need the ignore list to fit a large supplier catalogue under your plan's limit. The Free limit and fair use count only the products or variants in your store that a run syncs, plus any it would create or add, so supplier items you don't sell and don't create never count. Use the ignore list for items you sell but want Everstock to leave alone. Ignored items don't count towards either limit. See Plans, connection limits, and changing plan.

Expect one side effect. If you ignore an item this connection synced before, its store product is now absent from the feed as far as the comparison is concerned, so it is listed for review in each run, shown in the Per-record audit's Change column as "Not in this feed". Its stock is left alone. If you have set a rule for products no longer in this feed, that rule applies to it too. An item this connection never synced is not listed at all. That is the safety design working, not an error.

Cap the quantity you publish

Quantity cap (optional) sets the highest number Everstock will write to Shopify for this connection. With a cap of 25, a supplier quantity of 4,000 is written as 25, and a quantity of 12 is written as 12. Use it when a supplier reports a warehouse total you do not want to show, or uses a large placeholder number to mean "in stock". You can set a cap on the Connect a supplier page, in What syncs, and change it later on the connection page. Leave it blank for no cap.

The field's minimum is 0, and a stored cap of 0 or lower means no cap at all. That is deliberate. It stops anyone from zeroing a whole catalogue by typing 0 into one field. If you want to stop writing stock entirely, turn off Sync inventory instead.

The cap applies to quantity only. It never changes price.

Reserve stock with a buffer

Stock buffer (optional) reserves units before Everstock writes to Shopify: with a buffer of 10, a supplier quantity of 100 is written as 90, and a supplier quantity of 4 is written as 0. Use it to hold back stock for another sales channel, or as a safety margin against a supplier feed that runs a little ahead of what is actually on the shelf. Set it on the connection detail page and leave it blank for no buffer.

The buffer is applied first, before the cap. With a buffer of 10 and a cap of 50, a supplier quantity of 100 becomes 90 after the buffer, then 50 after the cap. The buffer never writes a negative quantity. A buffer bigger than the supplier's stock writes 0, the same as if that item were out of stock.

Like the cap, a buffer of 0 or blank means no buffer at all.

Preview changes and the run's Per-record audit both show the supplier's own quantity next to what Everstock wrote, so you can see the buffer's effect on each item rather than only the end result.

Blank quantities are skipped, not zeroed

If a feed row arrives with a blank, missing or unreadable quantity, Everstock skips the quantity for that row and leaves your existing Shopify stock untouched. It is never written as 0. When nothing else on that row changed either, the row counts towards the run's Skipped total.

Two related rules are worth knowing. A negative supplier quantity becomes 0, and a fractional quantity is truncated to a whole number.

The same protection covers a short or empty feed. A store product that is not in the feed never gets a stock write: it goes to review if this connection synced it before, and is left alone if not. A supplier outage cannot mass-zero your inventory.

Check your settings before a real run

Save the section first, because a run reads the stored values and an unsaved edit is not the setting your preview will use. Then run Preview changes. The preview is a dry run: its banner reads "Nothing has been written to Shopify", the Quantity column shows each proposed move as "5 → 12", and Download CSV gives you the full list. If your ignore list and cap are right, the excluded items are simply not there, and no capped quantity exceeds your cap.

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