How to Set Up Low Stock Alerts on Shopify (And Why It Gets Harder)

The Problem: Shopify Doesn't Alert You

You'd think a platform built for inventory management would have low stock alerts built in. It doesn't. Shopify lets you see your low stock on the Products > Inventory page, but it won't tell you when something is running low. No email. No notification. Nothing.

So you end up doing what every growing store owner does: logging in manually every few days (or hoping you remember to) and scanning your inventory page. It works until it doesn't — usually the moment you realize you oversold something because you didn't check in time.

There's also the Stocky complication. If you've been using Stocky's daily low stock report email, you have until August 31, 2026 to find an alternative. Stocky is shutting down, which means thousands of store owners are suddenly looking for a replacement.

The good news: there are ways to set up alerts. The challenging news: they all require some work on your end, and they all have a hidden cost that gets worse as you grow.

Your Options for Low Stock Alerts

Option 1: Manual Checking (Free, But Unsustainable)

Go to Products > Inventory and scan the list yourself. You can see stock levels for every variant in real time. Add the columns you need (SKU, stock, reorder point) and create a daily or weekly habit of checking.

This works if you have 20-30 products. Beyond that, you're spending 15–30 minutes a week just staring at inventory. And you're relying on memory or a manual spreadsheet to track which items you're actually watching.

Option 2: Shopify Flow (For Plus Merchants Only)

If you're on Shopify Plus, you can use Shopify Flow to build automations. In theory, you can create a workflow that triggers an email when inventory drops below a set number. The problem is simplicity at scale doesn't exist here.

Flow requires you to:

• Set a threshold for each product or variant manually
• Build separate workflows for different product categories (since different items sell at different rates)
• Update thresholds whenever your sales patterns change

For a store with 100+ SKUs, this is hundreds of individual configurations. And if your bestseller suddenly doubles in velocity, your old threshold is already obsolete.

Option 3: Third-Party Alert Apps

There are dedicated low stock alert apps in the Shopify App Store. They send you daily or weekly emails when products fall below thresholds you set. Some integrate with purchase orders or supplier management. Some offer Slack notifications.

The appeal is clear: centralized alerts, better formatting, maybe some extra features. But they still rely on the same broken model underneath: you setting and maintaining static thresholds per product.

The Real Problem: Static Thresholds Don't Scale

Here's what nobody tells you about low stock alerts: the system sounds simple until your catalog grows.

Imagine you sell fitness equipment. Your bestseller (a resistance band set) sells 20 units a day. Your slow-moving item (a specialty kettlebell) sells 1 unit a week. An alert threshold of "below 50 units" makes sense for the resistance bands — you'd get 2–3 days of warning. For the kettlebell, a threshold of 50 means you're sitting on dead inventory and getting false alarms constantly.

So you set different thresholds: 200 for bestsellers, 50 for mid-movers, 5 for slow movers. But now you have three thresholds to maintain instead of one. And when a slow mover suddenly trends on TikTok and sales jump 10x, your threshold is worthless.

The core issue: Every product has a different sales velocity. Setting a threshold manually for one product is tedious. Doing it for 100 products is a part-time job. Updating them quarterly as patterns shift? That's a recurring nightmare.

Most store owners give up. They set a generic threshold (like "50 units for everything") and learn to ignore false alarms. Or they stop checking altogether and hope they catch stockouts before customers do.

What Actually Works: Reorder Points (Not Just Alerts)

Before you build an alert system, you need to understand what you're actually trying to protect against: stockouts. An alert tells you when you're running low. But it doesn't tell you whether you have time to reorder before you hit zero.

This is where reorder points come in. A reorder point accounts for:

• How fast your product sells
• How long it takes to get a replacement shipment from your supplier
• How much buffer stock you want for unexpected demand spikes

Instead of a random number, your threshold is tied to your actual supply chain. That resistance band set with a 5-day lead time and 20 daily sales needs a reorder point of ~150 units (5 days × 20 units + buffer). The kettlebell with a 30-day lead time and 1 weekly sale needs ~5–10 units.

You can read more about calculating this in our guide on reorder points for Shopify. But the point is: alerts work better when they're based on real numbers, not guesses.

The Next Step: Forecasting

Alerts tell you when you're running low. But what if your system could tell you when to reorder before that happens?

That's the difference between reactive and proactive inventory management. An alert system reacts to low stock. A forecasting system predicts demand and suggests reorders before you hit your minimum threshold. You avoid the scramble, reduce safety stock, and free up cash tied up in inventory.

For stores with complex catalogs — seasonal products, trending items, multiple supplier lead times — forecasting turns inventory management from a daily firefighting task into a predictable process.

We'll dive deeper into this in our next article. For now, the key insight is: alerts are a starting point, but they're not the end state.

Setting Up Your Alert System (Today)

If you need to act now — especially if you were relying on Stocky — here's what we recommend:

1. Calculate reorder points for your top 20 products. These are your revenue drivers. Use the formula: (Daily Sales × Lead Time in Days) + Safety Stock. You can learn more in our safety stock guide.
2. Use a third-party alert app for those top 20. Set realistic thresholds based on actual sales data, not guesses.
3. For the rest of your catalog, accept that you'll check manually or use Shopify Flow. It's not ideal, but it's honest.
4. Plan to upgrade. As you grow beyond 100 SKUs, static thresholds become unmanageable. Start thinking about a demand forecasting tool that can handle the complexity.

This isn't the perfect system. But it beats the alternative: overselling, emergency supplier calls, and angry customers.