How Do I Set Up Low-Stock Alerts?
Set 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.
How the threshold is resolved
Every product alerts against a single number: the per-product threshold you set on the product's own edit page. If you never set one, the platform falls back to a built-in default of 5 units. There is no separate inventory settings page — the product card is the only place thresholds are configured. Setting a product's threshold to 0 disables low-stock alerts for that product entirely, which is handy for print-on-demand stores where you never technically hold stock.
Think of the default 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 everything else on the default. 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 Low Stock Alerts panel. The 'Alert when stock falls to or below' field lets you set a completely independent alert level for this product. The Enabled/Disabled toggle is a quick kill switch (click Save Settings after changing it): 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
Alerts fire at checkout time: whenever a customer completes checkout and the resulting inventory decrement drops a variant below threshold, an alert email goes out within seconds. Each alert fires once per crossing episode — you won't get a second email for the same variant until it has been restocked above the threshold and dips again. A nightly catch-all scan (07:00 UTC, for edge cases like manual stock edits) is built into the platform but is not switched on yet — so today, checkout is the only path that triggers an alert, and a manual stock edit won't email you until that variant next sells.
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 → open the product → update its inventory count, or the variant's Stock quantity), the alert state clears the next time that variant's stock is checked — so you won't keep getting 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.