Lot and batch tracking on Shopify: a complete guide

A lot, or batch, is a quantity of product made or received together under the same conditions — one production run, one harvest, one delivery from a supplier. Lot tracking is the practice of keeping that group identifiable as it moves through your business, rather than dissolving it into an anonymous stock total.

The value shows up when something is wrong with one group and not the others. If your records identify batches, a problem is bounded — you know which units are implicated and which are fine. If they do not, every unit you ever sold of that product is potentially implicated.

The terms are used interchangeably in most contexts. "Batch" is more common in food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals; "lot" is more common in manufacturing and distribution.

Shopify inventory is a quantity per variant per location. It supports tracking that quantity, adjusting it, and moving it between locations. There is no concept of the units within that quantity being distinguishable from one another.

Concretely, Shopify has no native field for a lot number, a batch number, a manufacture date, or an expiration date on inventory. Nothing records which specific units went into which order beyond the variant. And nothing can tell you which customers received stock from a particular delivery.

Metafields are sometimes suggested as a fix. They can store a value against a product or variant, but not against a subset of units within it — so a single expiry date on a variant is wrong the moment you receive a second batch.

Three approaches come up repeatedly, and each breaks under load.

Once batches are distinguishable, something has to decide which one ships. That decision is an allocation strategy.

FIFO draws from the oldest received batch, FEFO from the soonest expiring batch, and LIFO from the most recently received. FIFO is the intuitive default, but for anything perishable FEFO is the correct one — batches do not always expire in the order they arrive, and whenever those two orders diverge FIFO will strand short-dated stock behind long-dated stock until it expires.

Applying the strategy automatically at fulfillment matters as much as choosing it. A rule your pickers have to remember is a rule that holds until the first busy week.

The work that makes a recall survivable happens months before it starts. Specifically, it happens at every fulfillment, when the link between an order and a batch is either recorded or lost forever.

With that link, a recall is bounded: enter the batch, get the affected orders and customers, notify exactly them, quarantine what remains, export the case. Without it, you cannot identify who is at risk, so the only defensible response is to treat every customer who bought that product as affected.

The cost difference is enormous, and it is not only financial — a recall that reaches customers who were never at risk does more damage to trust than the targeted one it replaced.

A workable setup comes down to five decisions, in order.

LotTrack implements the above as a Shopify app. Lots sit over your existing Shopify inventory rather than replacing it, so quantities stay in sync and your team keeps fulfilling orders in the admin they already use.

It covers selective tracking, lot capture with dates and supplier references, CSV import, FIFO, FEFO, and LIFO allocation, QC hold and quarantine, lot splitting with lineage, expiry and low-stock alerts, returns reconciliation, nightly drift detection against Shopify quantities, recall cases with customer notification, an append-only audit trail, CSV export, and Shopify POS support.

Every one of those features is on every plan. Plans differ only in how many active lots and locations you track.