Vanishly takes about a minute to set up. Here is every step, plus how the three actions behave and what happens on restock and uninstall.
Add Vanishly from the Shopify App Store, or enter your store domain on the home page. Vanishly asks for read access to inventory and locations, and write access to products so it can hide and restore them. It never edits your theme.
On the dashboard, pick one of two actions: Hide (set the product to Draft) or Push down (move it to the bottom of its manually-sorted collections, where your theme greys it out as sold out). You can change this at any time.
Flip the big toggle. Vanishly runs one full scan of your catalogue, handles everything already sold out, then watches inventory in real time. There is nothing else to configure.
Keep pre-orders, made-to-order or coming-soon products always visible by excluding their collection, tag or the individual product. Excluded products are never hidden or pushed down.
Choose how sold-out products behave. Vanishly applies the same action everywhere, and reverses it automatically when a product is back in stock.
| Action | What it does when stock hits 0 | On restock |
|---|---|---|
| 🫥 Hide | Sets the product to Draft, so it disappears from your storefront and search | Set back to Active |
| ⬇️ Push down | Moves the product to the bottom of every manually-sorted collection it belongs to; your theme greys it out with its native “Sold out” state | Returned to its previous position |
Push down only reorders collections whose sort order is set to Manual — Shopify does not allow reordering automatic collections.
Shopify notifies Vanishly the moment an inventory level changes. A short debounce groups rapid updates, then the action runs — usually within seconds.
A periodic catalogue scan catches anything a missed webhook could have skipped and re-checks the products Vanishly is currently hiding.
Vanishly restores a product only if it was the one that hid it. Anything you set to Draft yourself is left exactly as it is.
Check that automatic mode is on, and that the product (or its collection or a tag it carries) is not in your exclusions. Vanishly also skips products with inventory tracking turned off, since Shopify does not report their stock.
Reordering only works on collections whose sort order is Manual. If a collection is sorted automatically (by price, title, best-selling, etc.), Shopify controls the order and Vanishly cannot change it — use the Hide action for those instead.
Vanishly restores on the next inventory webhook or reconciliation scan. If you added stock in bulk, give it a moment; the safety scan will catch it even if the webhook was missed.
Before uninstalling, turn automatic mode off so Vanishly restores every product it hid back to Active. Uninstalling also deletes your data from our servers. Nothing was written into your theme, so nothing is left behind.