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Low stock alerts across every location
The moment you hold stock in more than one place, one total number stops telling you the truth. Here is exactly how that goes wrong and how to get an alert for each location on its own.
By Fazeel Tanveer, Founder · Last reviewed 20 August 2026
The failure in one example
You hold 60 units of a SKU. Your alert threshold is 20, so nothing fires. But 58 sit in the warehouse that serves nobody this week and 2 sit in the store that sells it. The store is out and your alerting told you everything was fine.
On this page
Why your total stock number lies to you
Shopify counts stock per location and every order ships from one particular location. The total is just an accounting number. It is not what any one customer or shipment can actually get hold of.
A total hides three separate problems:
- The stock is in the wrong place. Plenty overall, empty where people are buying.
- Stock that cannot be reached. Units sitting in a location that does not serve the channel asking for them.
- A transfer nobody made. The stock move you meant to do does not show up in the total at all.
What you want is an alert per location, checked against a number that matches what that location actually sells.
Each location needs its own threshold
Copying one number to every site is only slightly better than using the total, because the same number means very different things in different places.
- They sell at different speeds. Your main store might sell ten a day where a smaller one sells one. Ten units is a single day of cover in the first and two weeks in the second.
- They restock at different speeds. A shop you can top up overnight from a nearby warehouse needs a much lower number than one waiting on a container from overseas.
- It hurts more in some places. Running out in the location that serves your best paying customers is not the same as running out in an overflow warehouse.
The sum is the same everywhere. Only the numbers change: units sold per day at that location, times the days it takes to restock that location, plus a buffer. See how to set a low stock threshold.
Send each location's alert to the right person
Once your alerts are per location, each one should reach whoever can actually do something about that location. A store manager cannot fix a warehouse and the warehouse team does not want every shop's alerts.
The setup that fails is the one where everybody gets everything. More emails arrive, fewer of them matter to the person reading them and within a month the whole team has a filter sending them to a folder nobody opens. That is worse than no alerts, because you think you are covered.
How to set up per location alerts
Shopify Flow can do it, though it takes a lot more condition building than the one location version and gets harder with every site you add.
An alerts app usually treats each location as its own thing, with its own number and its own check. In Stockwell, per location checking is on the paid plans, because it is the feature that only starts to matter once you have more than one site.
Whichever route, check three things before you rely on it:
- The email names the location, not just the product.
- It checks each location on its own instead of adding them together.
- A location sitting at zero with nothing moving still shows up. Silence and healthy stock should never look the same.
Every location judged on its own
Stockwell checks every location on its own against its own number and names that location in the email, so nobody has to work out which site is short.
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.
Common questions
Can Shopify send low stock alerts per location?
Not on its own. You can filter the admin inventory view by location and you can build Shopify Flow to check one specific location, but that takes extra condition work. Alerts apps usually check each location directly.
Should each location have a different threshold?
Usually yes. How fast a site sells and how fast you can restock it both vary, so the same number buys you very different amounts of time. Work it out per location using that location's own daily sales and its own restock time.
Why did I run out when my total stock looked fine?
Because orders ship from one specific location, not from the total. Stock piled up in one site while another sits near zero looks healthy when you add it up and is empty in real life.