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1. Make sure your stock numbers are right

Every other step on this list reads your stock numbers. If those are wrong, even good thresholds and good alerts will confidently tell you nonsense.

• Count regularly. Counting a slice of the catalog every week beats one big count a year that is out of date a month later.
• Treat missing stock as a paperwork problem first. A gap that keeps coming back usually means deliveries or picks are not being written down, not that stock is walking out the door.
• Check the continue selling setting. Variants set to keep selling past zero go into negative numbers, which throws off every sum that follows.

2. Set your thresholds from your real restock time

This is the single biggest change most stores can make. One round number across the whole catalog warns you too late on fast sellers and all day long on slow ones.

Units sold per day, times the real number of days a restock takes, plus a buffer. Worked examples in how to set a low stock threshold.

3. Measure how long a restock really takes

Almost everyone guesses this too low and that one mistake makes every threshold you set too low as well.

For your top products, look at the last three orders and write down the days from deciding to order to having stock you could actually sell. Count your own sign off, production, shipping, customs and booking the delivery in. Use the slowest of the three rather than the average, because the threshold exists to survive a bad month.

4. Make the warning come to you

A threshold nobody looks at prevents nothing. This is where most stockouts actually come from. The numbers were right, the threshold was sensible and nobody opened the screen during the week it mattered.

There are free ways to do this. Shopify Flow is free on paid plans and covers the simple case. All that matters is that something reaches you without you asking for it.

5. Send the alert to more than one person

Send alerts to one person and your system has a hole in it shaped exactly like their holiday. Busy season and time off overlap far more often than anybody plans for.

At the very least: whoever places the orders, plus one person who will notice when they have not. More on this in making inventory alerts get acted on.

6. Check every location on its own

If you hold stock in more than one place, the total tells you nothing useful. Plenty overall with nothing where people are actually buying still means you are out of stock.

Check each location against a number that matches what that site sells and how fast you can restock it. See alerts across every location.

7. Get ready before your busy season, not during it

A busy season hits you from both sides at once. Sales go up at exactly the moment your suppliers get slower.

• Raise your thresholds before the rush starts, to match the faster selling and the slower deliveries.
• Order earlier than feels necessary. The reorder point you worked out for a normal month is too low for a busy one.
• Check daily while it lasts rather than weekly.
• Put the numbers back afterwards, so your busy season thresholds do not leave you overstocked all year.

What not to spend money on first

Demand forecasting software is usually the wrong first purchase. It sharpens a number you are probably not acting on yet. If your thresholds are round numbers and nobody gets an email, a better forecast changes nothing at all.

Get the basics running, spend a season finding out where your alerts were wrong, then buy forecasting if what is still going wrong is genuinely about predicting demand rather than about nobody noticing.

Start with the step that pays fastest

Of the seven, making the warning come to you is the cheapest and the quickest to set up. Stockwell watches every SKU at every location and emails your team before stock hits zero.

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.