How alerts fire

Alertified checks an alert when Shopify reports a stock change for the alert’s variant at the alert’s location. It compares that location’s Available quantity with the alert’s threshold, notifies once when stock is at or below it, and then waits for stock to come back before it can notify again.

The rule

Stock changes in Shopify: a sale, a return put back into stock, a manual adjustment, a transfer, a received shipment.
Shopify reports the new stock level of that variant at that location to Alertified.
Alertified looks for alerts on that variant at that location and compares the location’s Available quantity with each alert’s threshold.
What happens next depends on the stock and on whether the alert has already notified:

| Available quantity | Alert has not notified yet | Alert is Triggered | |---|---|---| | At or below the threshold | It notifies on each of its channels and shows Triggered. | Nothing is sent. The Stock column updates. | | Above the threshold | Nothing is sent. The Stock column updates and the alert shows OK. | The alert re-arms silently and shows OK. |

“At or below” includes the threshold itself. With a threshold of 5, stock of 5 notifies and stock of 6 does not. With a threshold of 0, the alert notifies when available stock reaches 0 or goes below it.

Which number counts

The number compared is Shopify’s Available quantity at the alert’s location: the stock you can sell there, as shown in the Available column of your Shopify inventory. It is not the on-hand quantity, not incoming stock, and not the total across locations.

Each alert looks at its own location only. Stock at your other locations doesn’t affect it. To watch a variant at several locations, give it one alert per location.

Once per shortage

An alert notifies once each time stock reaches the threshold. While stock stays at or below it, further stock changes send nothing more; the alert keeps showing Triggered.

When stock rises above the threshold, the alert re-arms. No back-in-stock message is sent; the status simply changes to OK. The next time stock reaches the threshold, the alert notifies again.

For example, with a threshold of 5:

| Stock at the location | What happens | |---|---| | 8 → 5 | Notifies. Status Triggered. | | 5 → 3 | Nothing sent. Still Triggered. | | 3 → 20 (restocked) | Re-arms silently. Status OK. | | 20 → 4 | Notifies again. Status Triggered. |

The alert email says the same: you won’t get another alert for this product at this location until the stock rises above the threshold and falls again.

New alerts and changed thresholds

Alertified checks an alert at the next stock change Shopify reports for its variant at its location, not at the moment you create or edit it.

A new alert shows Waiting until that first stock change. If stock is already at or below the threshold then, it notifies.
A raised threshold on an alert that has not notified, now above its last known stock, shows Low Stock. The alert notifies at the next stock change at or below the threshold. A Triggered alert stays Triggered when you raise its threshold.
A lowered threshold on a triggered alert re-arms it when the last known stock is above the new threshold. See Edit and delete alerts.

A variant that rarely sells may stay Waiting or Low Stock for a while, until its stock next changes.

Where the notification goes

When an alert notifies, it sends one message on each of its channels:

Email goes to every address on the alert, one email each. The subject reads Low Stock Alert: followed by the product and variant, and the email lists the product, variant, location, current stock and threshold.
Telegram, Discord, Slack, Teams, Webhook and ntfy each get one message, as long as the channel is connected in Settings.

Triggered means Alertified has sent the notifications off. Whether each one was delivered is on the Logs page, with the status Sent or Failed.