Email Delivery Policy and Account Settings

Account delivery settings

Minimum quantity to send

You may wish to only notify customers when you have a minimum quantity of inventory available. The default of 1 will send customer notifications when a product has 1 unit or more in stock while a higher value requires more units. For example, a busy store may set a minimum quantity of five to send. Customers will only be sent a Back in Stock notification if there are five units (or more) of inventory. 

Send notifications for products that are sold out but available to purchase

Enable this setting to have Back in Stock notifications sent when a product is available to purchase as a 'preorder' product.

Back in Stock normally looks at the inventory quantity to determine if a product is in stock: if the quantity is greater than zero a customer notification will be sent. Sometimes you may wish to set a product to "Allow purchases when sold out" and not track inventory on the product. If you have products setup like this, and would like to send Back in Stock notifications for them, just enable this setting.

When sending customer notifications for products that are "Allow purchases when sold out" any minimum quantity or delivery policy settings for your account will be ignored for those products only. 

Delivery policy settings

Setting a Delivery Policy lets you control how many customers are notified at a time

For popular items you can easily end up with a lot of customer notifications. You may even have several times the quantity of inventory being replenished. With a Delivery Policy enabled you can restrict the number of customers being notified at once.

Example: A very popular product

For example, you might have 1000 customer notifications registered for a  Medium Green Jacket. You are only able to source 80 units of this jacket from your supplier. If you notify all 1000 customers at once your jacket will sell out but many customers will miss out on purchasing. Enabling a Delivery Policy restricts the number of customers notified based on the quantity of inventory available.

With a Delivery Policy enabled, and the notification rate set to 1, the first 80 customers will be notified. If half of these customers then purchase the Medium Green Jacket your store will have 40 units left in stock. In the next hour another 40 customers will be notified. This will continue until all customers have been notified, or the Medium Green Jacket has sold out again (time to order more stock!)

Delivery Policy settings

Your store Delivery Policy can be enabled and customized from the Delivery Policy settings page. 

NOTE:  Setting a Delivery Policy is only available to accounts on a paid plan.

To access the Delivery Policy controls, choose Account from the Back in Stock main menu, and then choose the tab labeled Delivery Policy.

Notification rate: You can choose to notify a greater or fewer number of customers than the quantity of inventory you have available. For example, setting a notification rate of 1.5 would notify 120 customers when 80 units of inventory is available (80 × 1.5 = 120).

Notification order: The Notification order allows you to choose what order to work through the notification list. You can choose to notify either customers who have been waiting the longest by choosing  Oldest notifications first or notify the most recent customers by choosing Newest notifications first.

Delivery interval: Setting the delivery interval lets you control how quickly the next batch of customer notifications is sent.

Multiple units: Only applies if your account uses the Quantity required field. With this option enabled customer notifications will only be sent if enough stock is available to fulfill a customers desired quantity. For example, if a customer has requested a notification and entered the required quantity as 4, that customer will only be notified once 4 units are available. Note that the calculation is not cumulative: if two customers have requested 4 units of a product, and six units becomes available, both customers will be notified. If you don't use the Quantity required field this setting has no effect.

You can disable the Delivery Policy by unchecking the  Enabled checkbox and clicking the button labeled Save Policy Settings. Your settings will be preserved, so you can always enable the Delivery Policy again later.

A note on fractional rates

When using a fractional delivery rate (such as 0.25) the number of notifications to send will be rounded to the nearest whole number. For example, a rate set to 0.25 with 30 units in stock would send 8 customer notifications (30 x 0.25 = 7.5 and then rounded up to 8). If number of notification to send is between zero and one it is always rounded up to one (for example: 0.25 x 1 = 0.25 but rounded up to 1).


Disable all email delivery 

There might be situations where you want to temporarily disable customer notifications being delivered.

To disable delivery visit the 'Campaigns' page. Uncheck 'Delivery' on the 'Product is restocked' step of the Campaign

.When you do enable delivery again Back in Stock will send customer notifications that are in stock at that time.

To disable delivery for a single product rather than all products please see Pause customer notification delivery for a specific product

If a product variant is renamed will customers still be notified?


As long as you edit the product variant, rather than creating a new variant, this will work fine. 

Back in Stock tracks product variants using the catalog id. This doesn't change when you update a product variant. It's fine to change things such as price, title, description and even the SKU. The catalog id won't change, so Back in Stock will continue to monitor the inventory level correctly.
However, if you are entering the product as a new variant under a different name a new id will be assigned to that variant. When this happens Back in Stock will continue to wait for updates to the old catalog id, and won't know you're now working with a new catalog id. If you do need to delete and re-create a product or variant simply drop us an email and we can link up your customer notifications to the new catalog id.

Will customer notifications be sent for products set to 'Don't track inventory'?


Customer notifications are sent when a product (or the product variant) has at least one unit in stock, and is published on your store.

Note: If your products are set to Shopify tracks this product's inventory you do not need to follow the process below.

Some stores use the Shopify setting Don't track inventory for products that are in stock. You can still have customer notifications sent for these products by ensuring the inventory quantity is set to '1' before setting Don't track inventory.

  1. From your Shopify store admin, open the Product list and choose the product you wish to set as in stock.


    If the product is already set as Don't track inventory change the inventory policy to Shopify tracks this product's inventory.

  2. Set the product inventory to 1, and hit Save.

  3. Once saved, switch the product inventory policy back to Don't track inventory and hit Save.


    Even though the inventory quantity field is now hidden the quantity of 1 is preserved, and Back in Stock will treat the product as in stock, and start notifying customers.

Can customer notifications be moved to a different product?


Yes, if you've introduced a new product that replaces an existing item we can arrange to move unsent customer notifications from the old product variant to the new product variant. Customers will then be notified when the new product variant is restocked.


To request this please contact [email protected] with the SKU code (or name)  of the both the discontinued product variant and the product variant it is being replaced by.

Can I manually send a customer notification?


Customer notifications are sent automatically when a product is restocked. There isn't a way to manually send a customer notification. 

How long does it take to send an email?


Generally within 60 seconds; but your stock levels are updated through webhook notifications from Shopify. Sometimes webhooks can be delayed, or not arrive at all. To allow for this an hourly update is performed on all recently modified products. As a rule, you can expect your customer to receive an notification email within 60 minutes of updating your product inventory.


Will customer notifications be sent for products set to 'Don't track inventory'?


Customer notifications are sent when a product (or the product variant) has at least one unit in stock, and is published on your store.

Note: If your products are set to Shopify tracks this product's inventory you do not need to follow the process below.

Some stores use the Shopify setting Don't track inventory for products that are in stock. You can still have customer notifications sent for these products by ensuring the inventory quantity is set to '1' before setting Don't track inventory.

  1. From your Shopify store admin, open the Product list and choose the product you wish to set as in stock.


    If the product is already set as Don't track inventory change the inventory policy to Shopify tracks this product's inventory.

  2. Set the product inventory to 1, and hit Save.

  3. Once saved, switch the product inventory policy back to Don't track inventory and hit Save.


    Even though the inventory quantity field is now hidden the quantity of 1 is preserved, and Back in Stock will treat the product as in stock, and start notifying customers.

Will renaming or updating a product prevent customer notifications being sent?


If you simply update a product, such as renaming it, or updating the description or photos, that will be fine. Back in Stock tracks products in the catalog using the internal Shopify id. This won't change if you simply update a product.

If you were to remove and re-create a variant, or remove and re-create a an entire product, this would generate a new id and we'd need to sync things up at this end.

Note that some tools, such as doing a CSV import to update products, can result in variant be removed and re-recreated on a product. When this happens Shopify assigns a new id to the variant. Back in Stock then can no longer track the updated variant. If this happens just email [email protected] with the name of the products affected and we can sync them up for you.

How can I remove/archive a discontinued product?


If a product is discontinued (and you will not be restocking it) then you don't have to do anything. You can leave the product in your Back in Stock account. Since it's no longer available to purchase the customer notifications will not be sent.

If you would like to remove the product from your Back in Stock dashboard (for example, you don't want to see it in your reports anymore) it can be archived using the Products report:

  1. Visit the Products report (https://app.backinstock.org/variants)
  2. Select the discontinued products by click the checkbox next to each one
  3. Click the Archive selected variants button at the bottom of the report.
This will archive the product and the customer notifications attached to it. (You should be sure you won't be restocking a product before you do this.)
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