Low-stock alerts on Shopify: what a good one looks like
Every merchant knows their stock levels. They are right there in the admin, accurate to the unit. And yet running out of a best-seller is one of the most common ways a small store loses a week of revenue.
The gap is not information, it is timing. The number is correct at all times and looked at almost never — usually on a Monday, usually after somebody asked.
What the threshold should actually be
Most people set a round number and move on. Ten units. Five. The useful threshold is not a quantity, it is a duration: how many units do you sell in the time it takes to restock?
If a product sells three a day and your supplier takes ten days, anything under thirty is already late. If it sells three a month and restocking takes a week, five is generous. The same round number is wrong in both directions depending on the product.
Alerts have to be per variant
A product-level alert is nearly useless in fashion or footwear. You do not run out of the shirt, you run out of the medium — and by the time total stock across all sizes drops below your threshold, the sizes that actually sell have been gone for a week.
The anti-spam problem
This is where most low-stock features become unbearable. A product sitting below the threshold fires an alert on every single order that touches it. Five orders, five identical messages, and by the third one the merchant has muted the channel — which means the next genuinely urgent alert goes unread too.
A good alert fires once when stock crosses the threshold going down, and stays quiet until the stock goes back above it. WhatsReport works exactly this way, and lets you exclude specific products you never want to hear about — the sample, the discontinued line, the item you deliberately let run out.
Where the alert should land
Wherever you will read it in the next hour. An email in a shared inbox is not that. For most small teams the answer is WhatsApp, on the phone of the person who can actually place the reorder — which is often not the same person who reads the daily revenue.
That is why WhatsReport gives each recipient their own permissions: revenue to whoever runs the business, stock alerts to whoever runs the warehouse, in their own language.