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Low stock alerts across every location
The moment you hold stock in more than one place, a single total stops telling you the truth. This is the specific way that fails and how to alert on each location on its own.
Last reviewed 16 August 2026
The failure in one example
You hold 60 units of a SKU. Your alert threshold is 20, so nothing fires. But 58 sit in the warehouse that serves nobody this week and 2 sit in the store that sells it. The store is out and your alerting told you everything was fine.
On this page
Why totals lie
Shopify tracks stock per location and fulfilment draws from a specific one. A total is an accounting figure. It is not what any single customer or shipment can actually reach.
Totals hide three separate problems:
- Uneven distribution. Plenty overall, empty where the demand is.
- Stranded stock. Units in a location that cannot serve the channel needing them.
- A transfer that has not happened. The rebalance you meant to do is invisible in the total.
The alert you want is per location, judged against a threshold that reflects what that location actually sells.
Thresholds differ by location
Copying one threshold to every site is only slightly better than using the total, because the same number means different things at different sites.
- Sales rate differs. A flagship store might move ten a day where a secondary site moves one. Ten units is a day of cover in one and two weeks in the other.
- Replenishment time differs. A site you can restock overnight from a nearby warehouse needs a much lower threshold than one waiting on a container.
- Consequences differ. Running out in the location that serves your highest margin channel is not the same event as running out in an overflow warehouse.
The method is the same everywhere, the inputs change: units per day at that location, multiplied by days to restock that location, plus a buffer. See how to set a low stock threshold.
Route the alert to the right person
Once alerts are per location, they should reach whoever can act on that location. A store manager cannot do much about a warehouse and the warehouse team does not want every store's alerts.
The failure mode is an alerting setup where everybody gets everything. Volume goes up, individual relevance goes down and within a month everyone filters the messages into a folder nobody opens. That is worse than no alerts, because you believe you are covered.
Setting it up
Shopify Flow can do it, though it takes noticeably more condition logic than the single location version and grows harder with each site added.
An alerts app generally treats location as a first class concept, so each location is evaluated on its own with its own threshold. In Stockwell, per location evaluation is on the paid plans because it is the feature that specifically matters once you have more than one site.
Whichever route, check three things before you rely on it:
- The alert names the location, not only the product.
- It evaluates each location separately rather than summing them.
- A location with zero stock and no recent movement still reports, since silence and healthy stock should not look identical.
Every location judged on its own
Stockwell evaluates each location separately against its own threshold and names the location in the alert, so nobody has to work out which site is short.
Get Stockwell on the Shopify App Store Free plan covers 50 SKUs with a daily summary. Paid plans add instant alerts and more recipients. No card needed to start.Common questions
Can Shopify send low stock alerts per location?
Not natively as an unprompted alert. The admin inventory view can be filtered by location and Shopify Flow can be built to check a specific location, but it takes extra condition logic. Alerts apps usually handle per location evaluation directly.
Should each location have a different threshold?
Usually yes. Sales rate and replenishment time both vary by site, so the same number means very different amounts of cover. Calculate per location using that location's own daily sales and restock time.
Why did I run out when my total stock looked fine?
Because fulfilment draws from a specific location rather than from the total. Stock concentrated in one site while another sits near zero shows as healthy in aggregate and empty in practice.