How to set up the stock and order alerts

Four watchdogs cover the things that go wrong in a store without anybody doing anything. All four ship switched off, so somebody has to turn them on. See How to turn an automation on, off, or run it now for the switch itself.

Low stock alerts

Tells you when a product's shippable stock drops to five or fewer.

Shippable stock is what can actually ship, meaning on hand minus what is committed to unfulfilled orders. That is the honest number and it is usually lower than the one in Shopify.

Each product alerts once when it goes low and re-arms only after it recovers, so a persistently low item does not nag every quarter of an hour. When several go low in the same run they roll up into one Inbox item rather than one each.

The alert names the variant and its quantity. It does not tell you how fast it is selling, so the useful next click is the stock screen, per How to find items running out, oversold, or not selling.

This needs a connected Shopify store, and it stops entirely if the stock module is switched off.

Fulfillment backlog alerts

Tells you when unfulfilled paid orders pile up past a number you set in Alert threshold (orders).

Choose that number from your own normal. Look at what Waiting to ship usually reads on the store dashboard, per How to look up orders and check your fulfilment backlog, and set the threshold somewhere above it that would genuinely worry you.

A threshold below your everyday level produces an alert that is always on, which everybody learns to ignore within a week.

It speaks once when the count crosses your threshold and re-arms when it drops back below.

Notable order alerts

Tells you when an unusually large order arrives, over a figure you set in Alert on orders over ($). It defaults to 1,000.

One alert per order, naming the order number, the amount in your store's currency and the customer.

Set it high enough to be genuinely notable. This is the alert most worth having on a phone, because a large order sometimes needs a human to look at it before it ships.

It reads the recent orders window, so set the figure and leave it rather than expecting it to catch up on history.

Stale-data watchdog

Tells you when your store data stops refreshing, after about a day of silence.

This is the one that catches the silent failure. A broken connection does not announce itself: your dashboards simply stop moving, and the numbers look plausible because they are yesterday's.

It measures freshness from your connected customer data, so it notices that side going quiet. Turn it on and leave it alone; it should never speak.

Who gets told, and how often?

Set recipients and the re-alert window per automation, and turn on Also email for the ones somebody must act on away from Tideswell.

The single most useful setting here is the re-alert window on the backlog alert, which stops a figure hovering around your threshold from buzzing all afternoon. See How to choose who gets an alert and how often.

What order should you switch them on in?

Low stock first, then Stale-data, because both are quiet by nature and catch expensive problems.

Add Fulfillment backlog once you have watched the dashboard long enough to know your normal number. Add Notable order last, and only if somebody will act on it.

Turn each one on, press Run now, and read the health line before moving to the next. See How to check whether an automation worked.