How Do I Set Up Low-Stock Alerts?
Configure global and per-product inventory thresholds so VeloCMS emails you the moment a SKU dips below your reorder point — before you stock out.
Running out of stock mid-campaign is one of those painful experiences every merchant goes through once — and then spends a lot of energy preventing afterward. VeloCMS has a built-in alert system that watches your inventory levels and fires an email the moment something drops below your reorder point. You define the threshold; the platform does the watching.
The global threshold
Head to Admin → Settings → Inventory. The 'Low stock threshold' field controls the default number that applies to every product that doesn't have its own override. The default ships at 5 units, which works well for shops with moderate SKU counts and normal lead times. If you run a print-on-demand store where you never technically hold stock, set this to 0 to silence all alerts at the global level.
Think of the global threshold as a floor, not a ceiling. You can always go higher per product — say, 20 units for a best-seller with a two-week production cycle — while leaving the global at 5 for everything else. That flexibility is exactly why the per-product override exists.
Per-product and per-variant overrides
Open any product from Admin → Products, then scroll to the Stock Settings panel. The 'Custom threshold' field lets you set a completely independent alert level for this product — ignores the global entirely. The 'Alert me' toggle below it is a quick kill switch: flip it off and VeloCMS will never send a low-stock email for this specific product, no matter how the inventory swings. This is handy for digital products where you've set a stock ceiling just for scarcity marketing, not actual physical inventory.
When your product has variants — sizes, colors, whatever — the threshold applies per variant row. If you have a blue shirt in XS through XL, each size tracks independently. The alert triggers when any single variant crosses the threshold, not the aggregate across all variants. You'll see exactly which variant triggered the email, so you can go reorder that specific size.
When alerts fire
There are two trigger paths. The first is real-time: whenever a customer completes checkout and the resulting inventory decrement drops a variant below threshold, an alert email goes out within seconds. The second is the nightly scan — a cron job that runs daily at 07:00 UTC, checking every active product across every tenant. This catches edge cases like manual stock edits, refund-triggered inventory restores that then immediately re-dip, or products you enabled tracking on after the last real-time event.
Alert emails go to the tenant owner's address — the same email tied to the account. There's currently no way to route alerts to a separate warehouse or ops address. If that's a blocker for your team, the workaround is forwarding rules on the owner's inbox.
Resetting after restocking
Once you've added stock (Admin → Products → [product] → Inventory tab → adjust quantity), the alert state resets automatically on the next nightly scan if the new quantity is above threshold. You won't keep getting repeated daily emails for something you've already restocked. The alert only fires again if stock drops back below threshold in a future sale.
Zero-stock and out-of-stock behavior
A low-stock alert is different from an out-of-stock block. When stock hits zero, VeloCMS automatically hides the 'Add to cart' button and shows an 'Out of stock' badge on the product page. Customers can't buy a zero-quantity variant regardless of alert settings. The low-stock alert is purely a heads-up to you; customers never see it.