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Alternative back in stock flow on shopify

  • 21 March 2023
  • 3 replies
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Hi, I’m looking for some assistance with setting up an alternative back-in-stock flow that can be triggered in an alternative way that inventory.

Back in stock function works correctly when a product is actually out of stock the issue is we want to display products as if they are out of stock when they are in fact in stock, as we have a fulfilment centre we cannot mess with inventory levels manually, they are synched so we need to imitate this process but not base it off of inventory level instead base it on some other product based value like a product tag or metafield. To display the button on a template all the time (product.out-of-stock template) trigger the sign-up form just like it would otherwise then when we trigger the product it runs the same process of creating a list and sending the email automatically.
Any help with this would be really appreciated.

Thanks

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Best answer by retention 21 March 2023, 20:15

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Userlevel 7
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Hi @peterbrunton, welcome to the community.

With a lot of disclaimers and “you’re playing with fire” warnings, you *can* technically do this with abundant caution by implementing your own Custom Catalog feed, inventory, and an adjacent Custom Back in Stock implementation.  This is how typically one would do this if you’re not on a supported platform and trying to implement this feature for a custom ecommerce solution. I’m not sure how this might interfere or even conflict with the Shopify + Klaviyo native implementation of it, so you’ll need to QA it carefully.  But you’re essentially creating your own back in stock, custom catalog “digital twin” of the Shopify inventory management and working off of the digital twin instead.


Note, all the front end part of adding users to the waitlist, the logic of checking the inventory status etc, may require your own custom development. See here:

You have full control of (and responsibility for) when, where, and how the trigger button appears; the appearance, text, and behavior of the modal; and all other aspects of the feature's behavior and appearance within your application.


So it can be done, but definitely requires a fair amount of development work.​​

Another way to do this, if your products come back in manageable frequency, is to just create your own Subscribe Form with a hidden dynamic parameter for the item (SKU or ProductID) and subscribe folks to a List.  When a product come back in stock, create a Segment of folks for that particular product and send a Campaign email to those who were waiting.  It won’t have the elegance of throttled batches of emails with automated time delay between each batch - you may have to do this manually, but it’s a nice work around that doesn’t require you to do complex developer implementation. 

Obviously if you have dozens or hundreds of products going in and out of stock constantly this becomes a manual burden - but if only a handful of items go in/out of stock infrequently, this might be workable.  In fact, many people still send Back in Stock Campaign notifications to not just folks on the waitlist but to a broader segment as well.  

Userlevel 5
Badge +16

Hi Peter,

 

Probably the easiest way to achieve this is explore a Shopify Flow. If you can change the product page template of a particular product when the tag “OOS” is added onto a product.

Hope that helps!

 

Thanks

David

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Thanks you so much for the info, very helpful.

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