Setting up your first restock alert

These are the same four steps, in the same order and the same words, as the checklist on your home page. If this page and the product ever disagree about the order of operations, trust the product and tell us — the disagreement is the bug.

Add what you sell#

Customers can only ask to be told about something that exists in your catalogue, so this comes first.

If you run Shopify: paste your Admin API key under Integrations and products come across with your customers and recent orders. Squarespace: paste your Commerce API key, same flow. Anything else, or no till at all: add products by hand at Products, or start from a CSV.

Add your customers#

Import them or add them at the counter — a restock alert needs somebody to go to. Customers → Import accepts any CSV with at least a name and an email. The more columns it carries (phone, last order date, lifetime spend) the better the tier scoring works, but none of them are required to send your first alert.

Get someone onto a waitlist#

This is the part that earns its keep: nothing sends until somebody is waiting for something. Print a QR shelf tag for the empty spot and the next person who wants that item adds themselves in about fifteen seconds, on their own phone, without installing anything. You can also add someone to a waitlist by hand from the counter.

Send your first restock alert#

The moment the product does its job — everything above exists to make this possible. Mark the product restocked and Restock Notify assembles the wave: it finds who asked, sizes the send against the stock that actually came back, and writes the draft with each customer's name and last purchase in it. You see the whole list before anything leaves.

Where the email comes from. Your shop's name is on every message from the first day. The address is ours until you connect Gmail or your own mail server under Settings — do that and the mail leaves from you, with your replies coming back to you. We would rather say this plainly than let you find out from a customer.

If your shop cannot send yet, the checklist says so in place of this step, and names the reason. Nothing queues silently.

The first three alerts are best sent manually. You learn the rhythm and you learn what your customers actually respond to. After that, Restock Notify can auto-draft the alert the moment inventory comes back in — you still review and send from the Outbox.

What happens next#

Opens and clicks roll in over the next 24–48 hours. Published benchmarks for back-in-stock alerts: 58–65% open rate (Omnisend, Barilliance · 2024) and about 21% click-through.

Read the conversion figure carefully, because the denominator matters more than the number. The 25–50% quoted in alert benchmarks is conversion of the people who click. Against everyone you told, that works out at roughly 5% — 21% of them click, a quarter or so of those buy. 5% is the figure Run my numbers plans with, deliberately, because it is the bottom of the published range. If a page ever quotes you 25% of your whole list, it is measuring a different thing.

We track the real outcome on the dashboard under Alert revenue · 30d — your own number beats anybody's benchmark by the second month.

If you don't see opens in the first 24 hours, the cause is almost always email deliverability: your SMTP sender isn't fully authenticated (SPF + DKIM + DMARC), your sender reputation is fresh, or the message is getting filtered to Promotions. Check the Outbox for delivery errors first, then verify your sending domain's SPF/DKIM records.