Setting up the Back In Stock app

Never Miss a Sale Again!

Our Back In Stock app is designed to make it easy for e-commerce shops to stay on top of inventory levels and ensure that customers are able to be notified when the products they want are restocked.

Here are some key benefits of using our Back In Stock App:

1. Increases Sales: Customers will know when a desired product is available for purchase, increasing the likelihood of sales and customer satisfaction.
2. Reduces Inventory Costs: With advanced analytics, you’ll have insights into which products are in high demand and decide to restock and keep optimal inventory levels.
3. Improves Customer Experience: Our app sends automatic and personalized notifications to customers, which creates a good impression and lets them know that you care about their needs.

How does it work?

When you have the Back In Stock app enabled, a Notify when available button will appear on your product pages for the products that are out of stock (inventory is 0 and below).

When a visitor clicks this button, a modal opens where he can subscribe with his email address:

Once the email address is entered, they will receive an email notification when the product variant they want is back in stock (The inventory of the variant becomes greater than 0).

If the user clicks on the Shop Now button from that email, he will be sent to the product page, with the desired variation preselected to make it easier for him to purchase.

Enabling the app automatically will add a "Notify when available" button on your product pages by default (near your Add-to-Cart button), provided that the product satisfies the basic requirements below:

• The product should have tracked quantity checked in Shopify
• The product quantity is 0 or below
• The product has the option Continue selling when out of stock unchecked

Navigating the Back in Stock app's Dashboard and Settings

The Back in Stock app's dashboard provides an overview of the app's activity on your store. It also has some settings you can modify according to your store's needs.

Within the dashboard, you can see a quick overview of the app's activity. Each visitor that successfully enters their email address after pressing the "Notify when available" button is called a subscriber. Below are the following information you can see related to their actions:

• Most Wanted Products - Products where there are subscribers are listed here.
• Latest Subscriptions - A list of the subscribers that recently subscribed to the Back In Stock app, with the products where they're currently subscribed to and when they were subscribed.

You will also see the number of emails sent to subscribers by the Back In Stock app in this dashboard. All stores under the Vitals all-in-one plan can send up to 10,000 Back In Stock notifications to visitors every 30 days. For a store with higher traffic that would need additional credits, you can reach out to our support team for assistance.

The Products section

• The Products section shows you further the products that were added by your visitors to notify them when the product receives stock:
  • Subscriptions - Total number of visitors subscribed to this product.
  • Pending - Number of subscribers that are waiting to receive notifications for the product.
  • Sent - If the product received stock, our Back In Stock app will send the email notifications to the email addresses of the subscribers.
  • Last subscribed - Date when the last visitor subscribed to this product. Useful to let you know if a product is being sought after by many visitors recently.

The Subscribers section

• The Subscribers section simply shows a list of visitors who clicked the "Notify When Available" and entered their email address for a particular product. It will also show if an email notification was sent to them successfully.
• Another useful piece of information here is if the visitor completes an order after clicking the "Shop Now" button inside the email notification, that order will be listed here, providing invaluable value.
• If the Back in the Stock app is disabled, no emails will be sent, but the subscribers will remain in the subscriber's list as pending. If the app is enabled again, the pending subscribers will receive the notification only if the restock happens after reactivating the app.
• Each subscription carries a status: Pending, Sending, Sent, Unsubscribed, Limit reached, Invalid phone number or Delivery issue. Use Filter by status above the table to narrow the list down - every status except Sending can be filtered on.
• Customers can unsubscribe at any time using the link in the notification email, or by replying STOP to an SMS. They then show as Unsubscribed in this list and stop receiving notifications from your store.

Exporting your subscriber list

You can download your subscriber list at any time. Go to Back in Stock → Subscribers and click Export subscribers above the table. The button appears once your store has at least one subscriber.

The export always covers every subscriber your store has ever collected, across all products - it ignores any search or filter you have applied to the table, so you get the same file no matter which page you are on. It downloads as a .csv file named back-in-stock-subscribers- followed by your store ID and the date of the export.

Each row contains the subscriber's email address, their phone number (if they subscribed by SMS), the product and variant they subscribed to, the date they subscribed, and the notification status of that subscription.

The Settings section

The Settings section is where you can change different aspects and behavior of the Back In Stock app. It is divided into 7 sections:

1. Button Style

You can customize the look and feel of the "Notify when available" button in this section such as the text itself, the button's colors and size, and even the border-radius!

2. Modal Style

This is where you can customize the appearance of the small window/modal that appears when a visitor clicks the "Notify when available" button.

Besides customizing the text elements inside this window, the colors can be changed as well to fit your store's brand.

3. Email Customization

You can also customize the email that will be sent to your subscribers once the product is back in stock.

Click Customize email and our rich email builder opens, where you can edit the Sender name, Subject, Reply-to address and Preview text alongside the body of the email itself.

Once you've finished customizing your email, you can send a test email to your email address to first see how it looks when received.

4. SMS Notifications

This feature allows merchants to send notifications to their subscribers that their products now have stock via SMS, with the first 20 SMS messages free.

SMS messages sent to recipients after the 20th message will be charged on top of the Vitals recurring subscription, with each SMS message charge rate depending on the recipient's region.

For example, if you send SMS notifications to 5 recipients and their entered phone number is in the US, a value of $0.03 USD per SMS will be charged, for a total of $0.15 USD + your Vitals subscription plan.

You need an active Vitals subscription for this. While you are still on the Vitals trial, the Enable SMS notifications button stays disabled and a banner asks you to upgrade your plan first.

Your SMS message can be up to 115 characters and has to include all three variables - {{ product_name }}, {{ shop_name }} and {{ short_product_url }}. Emojis and special characters are not supported. We also recommend keeping the "Reply STOP to opt out" line, since that is how customers opt out of your SMS notifications.

For a complete list of regions supported by this feature and the corresponding charge per SMS message sent, you may refer here: SMS Usage Charges for Back In Stock Notifications

5. Settings

This settings section provides different customization options on how you would like the Back In Stock app to behave on your store. Let us go through some of the important settings:

• Visibility - This lets you choose if you would like the "Notify me when available" button to be displayed according to your store's inventory policy.

The following options can be chosen:

• Stop selling when out of stock
  • The products will have a "Notify when available" button if the product variants' stocks are 0 and below, and the "Continue selling when out of stock" option is unchecked (default)
• Continue selling when out of stock
  • The products will have a "Notify when available" button if the product variants' stocks are 0 and below, and the "Continue selling when out of stock" option is checked
• Both
  • All products that have stocks 0 and below, regardless if the "Continue selling when out of stock" is checked/unchecked, will have a "Notify when available" button.
• Exclude products or collections

You can choose not to show the Back In Stock button on specific products or collections by excluding them, in this same section. This is useful for products where they are currently out of stock, but you don't have plans yet to replenish its stock in the near future.

• Notification Settings - Never send notifications for products with "Continue selling when out of stock" policy
  • Turn this on to keep the "Notify when available" button visible on your pre-order products while stopping the app from sending notifications for them. It is off by default.
• Notification Settings - Minimum Inventory Trigger (Default is 1)
  • This setting allows you to determine how much of the product's inventory needs to be restocked in order for our Back In Stock app to trigger and send emails to those who subscribed.
    • For example: If you set this at 30, this means that our Back In Stock app will only start sending emails to those who subscribed when you restock the out-of-stock products to 30 and above. If you only restock the out-of-stock products with only 10, the Back In Stock app will not trigger and will not send emails.
• Notification Settings - Limit the number of notifications sent per every restocked unit
  • When this option is checked, you can set a Notification limit - how many subscribers to notify for each unit of inventory. The app notifies up to your notification limit multiplied by the variant's inventory level after the restock, so a limit of 10 on a variant that comes back with 5 in stock notifies up to 50 subscribers.

  • For example, if you plan only to restock the products with 30 items, but you notice that 200 subscribers are subscribed, you may want to place a Notification limit to only send the notification to a limited number of subscribers and not all of the 200 subscribers.

    Note that this will prioritize the most recent subscribers as they have the highest probability of making a purchase.

6. Position

   

In this section, you can change the placement of the Back In Stock app in a number of ways. For more information, you may refer to our Help Center article here: How to Move Vitals Apps Around Your Shopify Store Pages

7. Translations

   

   If your storefront is displayed with multiple languages, you can customize the translated strings of the text contents inside the app. For more information, you may refer to our Help Center article here: Vitals translations on the storefront

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

My products have different stock levels depending on location. If I refill a stock only for one location, will it trigger the Back In Stock app to send notifications?

The Back In Stock App bases its trigger on the stock of your products in all locations. The app cannot support this new behavior of Shopify's stock system for multiple locations yet. But we are looking into it for a possible improvement of the app, so stay tuned!

I see that some of the subscriptions to my products have the status "Limit reached". What does this mean? Will they be sent?

When a subscription is marked as “Limit reached,” it means the recipient did not receive the notification because the app has already hit its monthly sending limit.

Once a new month begins and credits are refreshed, these notifications are not sent automatically, as the app cannot confirm whether the product is still in stock at that time.

Upgrading your plan is the exception. When you move to a higher plan, the app automatically re-queues these notifications: every email subscriber whose product is back in stock is moved back to Pending and notified. This covers email subscriptions only - anyone who subscribed by SMS alone stays as they are.

If you’d like to send these notifications manually instead, please reach out to our support team for assistance.

Can I change the email address sending the emails to customers when the stock is refilled?

You can change how the email presents itself. Open Customize email in the Email customization section and set your own Sender name, Subject, Reply-to address and Preview text, so replies come back to you rather than to us. The email address it is actually sent from stays a Vitals address, which is what keeps delivery fast and reliable.

I updated some variants in some of my products, and now some subscribers are missing! What happened?

Since the Back In Stock app saves the variant that is selected by the subscriber, if that variant is removed or if the associated product is deleted, then the subscribers connected to those will be removed as well.

Can the Back In Stock App be connected to my Klaviyo account?

Not at the moment. Our integration with Klaviyo is only limited to the email addresses captured by our marketing apps like the Pop-up app, Announcement Bars app, and the Spin the Wheel app.