Unfulfilled order

Perfectly normal for a few hours. A problem when it is a few weeks.

What it is doing to your numbers

Those units are committed. On hand still counts them, and available inventory does not.

So a line with 40 on the shelf and 12 sitting in old unfulfilled orders sells as though it has 28. Nothing is wrong with the shelf. Something is wrong with the list.

Work the oldest first

Sort by date, not by value. The oldest unfulfilled orders are the ones that are either forgotten, stuck behind a backorder, or shipped and never marked as fulfilled.

Anything over a week wants an answer today: send it, cancel it, or fulfil the part you can.

Where it goes wrong

The list is treated as a queue rather than a report. Nobody reads it from the bottom, so a handful of orders sit there for months quietly holding stock, and the store keeps reordering a line it already has.

The other one is cancelling to clear the list without restocking. Shopify asks whether to return the units to inventory and the default is easy to click past. Say yes, or you have written the stock off and it will turn up again at the next count.