How can I automate inventory notifications for specific customer requests?

Shopify Plus
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Topic summary

A consignment retailer with unique, constantly changing inventory wants automated alerts when new products match specific customer requests (e.g., a Prada t‑shirt) so staff can proactively contact interested buyers.

Key need: Match customer interest criteria (brand, size, style, etc.) against newly added products and trigger notifications.

Guidance offered: Consider a dedicated app to handle the matching logic, as it can be complex. Shopify Flow (Shopify’s automation tool) could assist with simple triggers—such as when vendor matches or specific product tags are present—but encoding full matching logic solely in Flow would be complicated.

Potential approach:

  • Use a third‑party app focused on customer requests/waitlists to capture preferences and match incoming products.
  • Optionally pair with Flow for basic rules (e.g., vendor or tag-based notifications) to alert staff.

Status: No specific app named; the recommendation is to explore apps for interest-product matching. Open questions remain around which app to use and how granular the matching criteria should be.

Summarized with AI on January 8. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hello,

I run a brick & mortar and online merchandising store and am looking for some help with a service or work around that could help us solve an issue.

The shop we run is a consignment shop, so each of our products are unique pieces, and we get new inventory in everyday. Often, our customers have requests for specific products they’re looking for or pieces theyre wanting to buy. Since we have no way of predicting what our inventory will look like in a week or a month, we’re looking for a way to get notified when any inventory matches a customer request.

for example, enter somewhere that customer Jane is looking for a Prada tshirt. when we go to add a new product that matches that description, we are able to receive some notification that we should reach out to that customer.

is there anything like that out there? or any kind of Shopify work around to automate the process?

1 Like
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I think you need to consider how you are going to match interest with an actual product. It can imagine it might be brand, size, style, etc. Probably you should be looking for app to do that rather than Flow. Flow could help, for example by checking if a vendor matches or if a product has certain tags, but because the app logic is likely rather complicated, it would be pretty complicated to write all of that logic in Flow.