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How inventory alerts die, step by step

It happens the same way in almost every store.

1. Alerts get switched on with one number across the whole catalog.
2. Slow sellers sit under that number all year and email every day.
3. People learn that most alerts need nothing done about them. Based on what they have seen, they are right.
4. Somebody makes a filter. The folder stops getting opened.
5. The one alert that mattered lands in that folder and something runs out anyway.

Alert on fewer products, not more

The instinct when you set alerts up is to cover everything. At the start that is the wrong instinct.

Start with the products where running out really hurts. Best sellers, imports that take weeks to arrive and anything customers come back for on purpose. Set those numbers carefully. Leave everything else unwatched for now.

Alerts on 40 products that are right almost every time get read. Alerts on 4,000 that are mostly noise get filtered within two weeks. You can always add more products once the alerts have earned some trust. Winning that trust back after you lose it is far harder.

Who should get the alert emails

There are two ways to get this wrong, they point in opposite directions and both are common.

Sending to one person. Your system now has a hole in it shaped exactly like their holiday and busy season and time off overlap far more often than anybody plans for.

Sending to everybody. An alert that lands with eight people is an alert nobody actually owns. It is remarkable how reliably all eight assume one of the others has it covered.

The workable shape:

• One clear owner who is expected to act.
• One backup who covers absence.
• A summary for whoever answers for the lost sales, as one daily email rather than a stream of them.

If your alerts differ by location, send each location to whoever can actually do something about it. See alerts across every location.

What a good alert email should contain

A good alert lets you decide what to do without opening anything else. It should carry:

• The product and variant name, not just a SKU code
• How many are left and the number it dropped past
• The location, by name rather than an ID number
• A direct link into the product in Shopify admin

The test is simple: can somebody reading it on their phone decide what to do without logging in? An alert that needs digging before you can decide gets put off and put off is the same as ignored.

Instant alerts and daily summaries do different jobs

Instant alerts catch sudden drops, where a few hours really do make the difference. Save them for the products where that is true.

A daily summary catches the slow drain and gives you one view of everything running low. It is also the format that survives a busy week, because it is one email at a time you expect rather than a stream arriving at random.

Most stores want instant alerts on a short list of critical products and a daily summary for everything else. Instant alerts on the whole catalog is exactly how that email filter gets created.

Review what your alerts got right and wrong

Once a quarter, look back at two things.

• Stockouts nobody got an alert for. Either the number was too low or that product was not being watched.
• Products that alerted again and again but never ran out. The number is too high and every one of those emails is costing you trust.

Adjust on what actually happened and you will have a genuinely good setup within a couple of quarters. Nobody gets these numbers right first time. The setups that work are simply the ones somebody kept correcting.

Alerts built to stay credible

Stockwell gives every SKU its own number so slow sellers stop crying wolf, names the product and the location in the email and sends a daily summary alongside instant alerts.

Get it on the Shopify App Store Free plan covers 50 SKUs with a daily summary. Paid plans add instant alerts and more recipients. No card needed to start.