I need assistance in automating an “Out of Stock” customer notification option that I have had custom installed in my “Enterprise” theme. Currently, when a customer requests a notification on a “Out of Stock” item a notification shows on the screen that their request has been submitted, I then get an email letting me know the form has been submitted and the item (Variant Link) they request notification on.
Is there a way to set it up so that when the customer submits the form a customer account is created with a tag for notification of the product? Then when the product is back in stock an email is sent to notify the customer and the tag is removed.
I see this system setup all the time using other 3rd party apps that you have to pay for but there should be a way to set this up with a little coding added to the initial form triggering the “Flow” and using “Email Templates”.
Hey @Katstormphoto ! I run an Aussie-founded back in stock app (Early Bird), so might be able to shed some light on this.
You could potentially custom code this type of functionality yourself using Flow, but you’d also need an email service (like Klaviyo or Shopify Email) to be connected, and you would still miss out on advanced functionality and analytics which come with a back in stock app.
Have you tried any back in stock apps before? IMO it might end up being cheaper to use a 3rd party app when comparing it to the amount of time required to custom code the functionality, but if you have an in-house dev, you can decide if the time commitment is good value for you.
We do have a Free plan for our app which lets you collect an unlimited number of email signups (and creates a customer record in Shopify for each with a Back in Stock tag), so you could also consider capturing signups that way, and then attaching your own sending service.
Though we do have a built-in email template/sending service, and logic to do advanced sending in batches, with stock threshold settings and email deliverability reports etc., so you may also want to try that and see if it works for you before deciding if you want to try custom building something.
@Katstormphoto We have been running a back-in-stock alerts app (STOQ) for three years, so I can share some context. Most themes have a built-in flow to make it easy for businesses to get up and running. That flow is designed to be a dead-simple way to track requests, and it works really well when you have a handful of products or custom/made-to-order type products.
If you’re selling a decent sized number (think 50+), I’d recommend setting up a back in stock alerts flow provided by your email marketing platform (Klaviyo, Shopify email etc) or get a back in stock alerts app. You can’t go wrong either way and both are infinitely better than the built-in option.
You’ll find plenty of posts in the Community forums for setting up a back in stock flow with Klaviyo; it’ll take a few minutes and some coding to set up but it will give you a ton of flexibility on the email marketing platform’s end. If you use a back in stock alerts app, there is no coding effort - it’s just a few clicks to set up and configure.
Most apps in our category, including ours, have a generous free plan. You can start collecting signup requests, visualize that data to see what customers are looking forward to and then pay only when you’re ready to scale up revenue from sending out alerts!
Filter the customers to pull those that have the tags. In this screenshot, I am using a sample tag that uses the variant SKU as a unique identifier. If you aren’t using SKUs already, you could copy the variant IDs over to the sku field.
“Get customer data” can pull max 100 customers. So if you have more than 100 customers with the tag, that will be problematic.
To create the tag in the first place, use the trigger “Metaobject entry created” for form entries. There is a lot of information about this. To get the SKU into the metaobject entry, you will need to have a field in the form where the user selects the product from a list of products. Even if they’re already on the product page on the website, you will still need to have this form field, otherwise the product data won’t exist in their form submission.
