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 Hobby plan can send up to 100 Back In Stock notifications to visitors every 30 days. For a store with higher traffic that would need additional credits, you can explore our higher plans.

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.

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 6 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.

Don't worry, you can click the Customize Email button, and you will be shown our rich Email Builder to fully customize the email according to your needs.

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 [NEW]

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.

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 - 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, it will let you set a value pertaining to the maximum number of subscribers you would like the app to send emails to when the products are restocked.

• 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. Placement and Translations

Placement - 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 articles below:

• Using the Shopify Theme Editor to change Vitals app locations
• Changing the Placement of the app using our Vitals Editor

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