We wrote about Shopify's public /products.json catalog feed as if it were the complete picture: paginate products.json?limit=250&page=N, get every product, no auth, no key. That's still true for prices, variants, images and options. It is not true for stock levels and barcodes — and the fix isn't a different site, it's a different endpoint on the same store.
Two public, key-free endpoints, two different variant schemas
GET https://<store-domain>/products.json?limit=250&page=1 # bulk, paginated
GET https://<store-domain>/products/<handle>.json # one product
Both require zero authentication. But the bulk feed's variants[] omits inventory_quantity, inventory_management, inventory_policy and barcode entirely — those four keys are just not present in the JSON, not null, not empty. The per-product endpoint returns the same variant ids with all four fields populated (when the store publishes them).
Verified live against allbirds.com/products/mens-strider-explore.js and its .json counterpart: real UPC barcode (196942208243), real inventory_quantity: 0 on a sold-out variant, inventory_management: "shopify", inventory_policy: "deny" — matched id-for-id against the bulk feed's variant ids, 13 for 13. The .js and .json per-product routes agree on every field we compared; we use .json for consistency with the rest of the scrape.
Exposure is a per-store setting, not a per-endpoint one
Whether a store publishes real numbers has nothing to do with which endpoint you call — it's a merchant/theme setting, and it varies:
- allbirds.com — real quantities and real UPC barcodes.
- brooklinen.com — a barcode field populated, but it's an internal SKU (
COR-T1), not a GTIN, and no quantity. - rothys.com — barcodes present, quantities absent.
So "get real inventory counts" can only ever ship with a "when the store publishes them" hedge. Treat a missing field as null, never as 0 or a guess — 0 is a real, meaningful value (sold out) and conflating it with "not published" is worse than not shipping the field at all.
The trap: untracked variants report a sentinel, not a real number
The first real test run surfaced this the hard way: one allbirds product ("Free Returns Coverage," a digital add-on with inventory_management: null) reported an inventory_quantity of 999999. Roll that into a naive per-product stock total and a real catalog's total inventory comes out as 1,981,856 — off by six orders of magnitude on exactly the kind of number a buyer might screenshot and trust.
The fix: only sum quantities for variants where inventory_management is actually set ("shopify", or a fulfillment service name). Untracked variants keep their raw per-variant value if you want to expose it verbatim, but never fold them into a roll-up total. If you're aggregating stock across variants for any Shopify store, gate on inventory_management first — one untracked variant will silently swamp the whole sum.
Practical takeaways
/products.json(bulk) and/products/<handle>.json(per-product) are both public and key-free, but only the per-product route carriesinventory_quantity,inventory_management,inventory_policyandbarcode.- Fetching per-product detail already costs one request per product if you're doing it for anything else (SEO metadata, ratings) — merging in the stock/barcode fields from the same response is free; you don't need a second extra request.
- A missing field means "this store doesn't publish it," not zero — keep that
null, not0. - Any inventory roll-up across variants must exclude variants with no
inventory_managementset, or a single untracked/digital variant's sentinel value will corrupt the total.
This is exactly what Shopify Products Scraper's detailLevel: "full" mode does now: per-variant barcode, inventoryQuantity, inventoryManagement, inventoryPolicy, and a store-honest totalInventory roll-up — at the same per-product price as before, no extra charge for the extra fields.
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