Use Flow to Automate Your Inventory Management and Reorder Low-Stock Products

Shopify Plus lets you spend more time on your business development and less time ensuring your website functions the way your customers need it to.

Shopify Flow

The Plus only feature, Flow, is a condition based builder that allows you to set up automatic workflows using triggers, conditions and actions. These workflows can help to automate most manual tasks completed within your Shopify account.

As Flow is comprised of a multitude of different conditions, these buildable workflows are limited only to your imagination!

Use Flow to Automate your Inventory Management and Reordering for Low-Stock items

Picture this: your eCommerce store is in the middle of running a flash sale, and bam - all of a sudden, you’ve run out of stock. How did this happen!? You ask yourself.

Manual inventory management can be messy. People make mistakes - we’re only human. Rather than leaving it to a purely manual process, you should instead be automating your inventory management. Not only will this save you a bucketload of time, but it means you can focus your attention on the more important stuff.

Using Flow, you can set up a workflow to automatically send you a notification when you reach your low stock threshold. You can also send this notification to a vendor to trigger a restock.

So, let’s get this automation party started!

Set up your automation to send a low-stock notification and reorder prompt

1. Define a trigger to prompt a workflow to initiate.

By navigating to the menu on the right, you can view all possible triggers. In this instance, select inventory quantity changed.

2. Add a condition to define where you would like the automation to start

In this workflow, the first condition we have selected is inventory quantity. Next, we’re going to refine this to apply to the product’s variant inventory (e.g. Green T-shirt, size Small). From the menu on the right, scroll down to the product variant and select inventory quantity.

At this stage, we want to define the rules for your condition. For product variant inventory quantity, we want to set up an automatic trigger when a product drops below a certain quantity by selecting is less than from the dropdown box on the right-hand side. You can then specify your desired minimum inventory quantity by typing a number into the box below.

You can add a second condition by selecting add another condition under your first condition from the menu on the right.

In this workflow, we wanted to use a specific vendor as a condition in order to send them a reorder notification. By navigating to the menu on the right-hand side, scroll down to product and select vendor.

Again, you must specify the rule for your chosen condition. For our second condition, product vendor, select is equal to from the drop down menu, then type the name of the product vendor into the field below.

3. Initiate an action when inventory is low in stock

The next step is to select an appropriate action for the condition by selecting add action under the then condition and choosing an option from the menu on the right.

For this workflow, we have opted to send an email when a product is low in stock and needs to be reordered. You can input multiple comma separated email addresses to send this notification to more than one person.

You can also select add template variable to send additional information to you about the order. For this workflow, we have opted to advise us along with the vendor that the specific product variant needs to be reordered as it is low in stock. You can add a mixture of your own text as well as the template variable options.

Unsure what to do in Flow?

We’re creating new workflows all the time, below you’ll find a few other interesting automations:

Require Assistance?

If you’re new to Flow or having trouble setting up a workflow please feel free to contact our team! Elkfox are Shopify Plus Experts, we’re here to help.