The problem
Checking stock by eye is slow and bestsellers still sell out. If a shop checks its 90 products for 10 minutes on each of 22 working days, that's 220 minutes, 3.7 hours a month, and a bestseller out of stock for 5 days at 4 sales a day and £30 is 20 x £30 = £600 in lost sales.
What the AI does
Shopify Flow is a free app on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. Shopify provides a template called 'Get notified by email when product variant inventory is low'; start from it. Its 'Product variant inventory quantity changed' trigger makes the current quantity available (inventoryLevels, available), so you set the reorder level to test against, and its 'Send internal email' action tells you and your packer which product is low. 'Product variant out of stock' is an optional extra trigger for a second email when a product hits zero. A person sets the reorder levels and decides what to order.
A worked example
A tea shop in Norwich with 90 products and two staff sells on Shopify Basic. The owner builds one Flow workflow for the 20 fastest sellers and checks the rest during a weekly stock walk.
Before
10 minutes a working day scanning stock: 22 x 10 = 220 minutes, 3.7 hours a month
After
3 minutes a day acting on alerts (22 x 3 = 66 minutes) plus a 10-minute weekly check that alerts still arrive (4.3 x 10 = 43 minutes): 109 minutes, 1.8 hours a month
What it's worth
About 1.9 hours a month saved (111 minutes), worth around £46 if your time is worth £25 an hour. The bigger prize, one avoided stock-out of £600 in sales, is not counted. Flow is free; the cost is the Shopify plan, £25 a month or £19 billed yearly, which you'd pay anyway if you already sell on Shopify.
How to set it up
- Make sure stock tracking is switched on for the products you want alerts for.
- Open the Flow app and start from Shopify's 'Get notified by email when product variant inventory is low' template.
- Set the reorder level the template compares against, using the available quantity, for the products you care about.
- Check the email goes to you and whoever orders stock, with the product name in it, and optionally add a second workflow on 'Product variant out of stock'.
- Test with a spare product, then once a week lower a test product's stock and confirm the email still arrives.
What goes wrong
- Automations can fail silently. If the workflow is switched off, an email goes to spam or the wrong address, you hear nothing until a product sells out. Check a test alert weekly.
- Alerts only work for products where Shopify tracks stock; untracked items and stock sold in a physical shop or marketplace not connected to Shopify won't trigger.
- One alert per quantity change can mean a lot of emails for fast sellers; set sensible reorder levels and start with a short list.
- Flow tells you stock is low, not how much to order or whether a supplier has it; a person still decides.