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Back in stock — setting it up

Back in stock is Disabled until you enable it: nothing appears on your store, and no form is made or published for you. Setting it up is two things you do — enable it, and add the block to your product page — and then a look at your own store. The app does the rest, including the bot check.

Open Content → Back in stock, then Set up back in stock (or Settings, once requests are arriving). The page is one column. A line at the top counts what is done — 0 of 3 done — and only the step you are on is open, with one button to press. A finished step folds to a single line with a green check; press it to open it again. A step you have not reached yet is shown quietly, marked Next.

1. Enable back in stock

Press Enable. That one press makes your store's back-in-stock form if you do not have one yet, publishes it, and sets up the bot check. If your form was paused, Enable resumes it. Under the switch a line says how the bot check is doing — setting up… for a few seconds, then ready — and the page looks again on its own.

The step's pill tells you where it stands:

• Disabled — nothing appears on your store.
• Setting up… — enabled, and the bot check is a few seconds from ready. Nothing is wrong and there is nothing to press.
• Enabled, green with a check — it works.
• Bot check not ready or No button yet — something needs you, and the step says what, with the button that fixes it.

Enabled never means more than it says. Until the bot check is ready your store shows no Notify button, and the step says so.

Disable stops it. It pauses your back-in-stock form, so every Notify button on your store disappears at once. Nothing is deleted — the people waiting, your settings and your form all stay, and Enable brings it back. Once the step is done it folds; open it to find Disable. Anyone who can publish your forms can enable or disable back in stock.

Your store has exactly one back-in-stock form, and once it exists the step carries an Open the form button, which is the way back whenever you want to change the words. It is an ordinary form — it opens in the same form editor as every other form you have, and you can change the headings, the words, the colors and the images. Its first panel is called Back in stock notification, and it is what a shopper reads: the Notify control on your product page opens it as a pop-up. In the editor, Test and preview shows it three ways — to a new shopper, to a shopper your store recognizes in that browser from their first signup there, a texted code, or being signed in (who gets a shorter panel with one button), and after they ask.

Two things in those words are filled in by your store, so you write the sentence once and it is right on every product: Product name becomes the name of whatever the shopper is looking at, and Variant name becomes the variant's — nothing at all on a product that has only one, taking any line it was alone on with it. Choose a heading or paragraph and press + Product name or + Variant name to put one in. The thank-you panel can use both, and the Email address field for the address they typed.

Enabling checks a handful of things about the form itself; if one of them is not right, the step lists what to change and links you to the form to change them, and back in stock stays disabled until it is fixed.

While the form is still exactly as we made it — you have opened it and changed nothing — it is brought up to date whenever we improve the one new stores start from, the next time you open it, and the form tells you so: Updated to the current starting point. Change one word and the form is yours; nothing replaces it after that.

Three things on this form are not yours to remove, and your store will tell you before you publish rather than after:

• Product name somewhere in the first panel's words;
• Variant name somewhere in them too;
• the line saying what the shopper is agreeing to, which every form that collects an email address needs.

The wording, the colors and the arrangement are all yours. What cannot go is the part that lets a shopper check what they are asking about — a form that says "this product" is a form nobody can check.

The image block set to the product is on both panels to start with, and it is yours to move, resize, restyle or take out. It shows the variant's own photograph where there is one, the product's where there is not, and nothing at all where there is neither. Take it off the first panel and your store draws a small one at the top anyway — never two.

2. The block in your theme

Press Add the block in your theme editor, then Save in the theme editor: the block is already placed in the section that holds your buy buttons. Come back to this page and the step checks your theme again on its own; Check again does it by hand.

The step reads your published theme: Done, green with a check, once the block is there, or Could not check where it cannot look. Placing the block is yours to do; the app can only check that it is there.

If you would rather do it yourself, open Add it by hand instead under the button. It is the same four moves: Online Store → Themes → Customize, open a product page, Add block → Back in stock, Save. Put the block in the section that holds your buy buttons, directly after them. A store connected by an older custom app has no button on this step, and the four moves are shown instead.

Add the block to every product template your theme uses. In Shopify, a block belongs to one product template, not to every product page. The button above, and the Done check, cover your default product template only. If some of your products use a template of their own — a template for bundles, for example — those pages show no Notify control until you add the block there too: in the theme editor, pick that template from the menu at the top of the screen, then Add block → Back in stock, directly after your buy buttons, and Save. Do it once for each product template.

The block has two settings of its own: the button's words, and which button it matches — Match your theme's buttons, the default, which makes it look like your own Add to cart button, or Match your form's button, which gives it the colors of the button on your back-in-stock form. The block has no color of its own: to change the button's color, change it on your form. There is nothing else to set — everything a shopper reads is on your form, and the product and the variant are filled in from the page.

On the storefront the block draws nothing at all while the selected variant can be bought, which is most of the time and is correct. In the theme editor it shows you the real Notify me button. On a sold-out variant it takes the place of your theme's Add to cart, exactly as it does on your store; on a variant that can be bought it sits in the block and your Add to cart stays as it is. Press it and your form opens, naming the product you are looking at; nothing is sent from the theme editor. If back in stock is disabled, the block shows a dashed box instead — Back in stock is disabled — with an Enable it in Carpe Messaging button that takes you straight to this page. If it is enabled but the check that keeps bots out is not set up yet, the box says that instead, with an Open back-in-stock settings button — until then your store shows no Notify button either. The block's own settings name the same place in words: Content → Back in stock → Settings.

It appears in the Add-block list on every page, not only product pages. Off a product page it draws one line saying it only appears on a product page, so you can see you have put it somewhere it will not work.

The bot check

Every press of Notify carries a quick check that a person, not a bot, pressed it. Enable sets it up for your store, and so does every publish of your form; there is nobody to ask. Until it is ready no Notify button is drawn, and the line under step 1 says Bot check: setting up….

Most shoppers never see the check; when it does appear it is one tick box. A shopper signed in to your store and asking with their own account's address skips it. One press of Notify is the whole request.

If the check is still not ready after about thirty seconds, the line reads Bot check: not ready, the pill reads Bot check not ready, and a Set it up now button appears on step 1. Anyone who can publish your forms can press it, it is safe to press again, and the page goes back to looking on its own.

A few answers are worth knowing if you see them:

• We cannot see your store's web addresses yet. Your store is still being connected. Give it a moment and press the button again.
• This store cannot be set up until we add capacity. That one is ours, not yours. We can see it and we are on it.
• Your store has more web addresses than one check can cover. Also ours. It happens on stores selling in several countries from several addresses, and there is nothing for you to change.
• The check is not set up correctly on our side. Ours as well, and the one answer where pressing the button again changes nothing: it will say the same thing every time until we have fixed it. We can see it and we are on it.

No Notify control is drawn at all while the check is missing — not a broken one, not one that fails when somebody presses it. Your product page is exactly as your theme drew it.

3. See it on your store

Once steps 1 and 2 are done, step 3 opens with an Open a sold-out product button. Press it and look: the Notify control should stand where the sold-out button was, and open your form. The app cannot see your theme's own buttons, so this check is yours — two minutes, once per theme.

The button opens one of your own sold-out products, never a gift card. If nothing in your store is sold out right now, the step says so and there is no button. Step 3 is never ticked off for you, because only you can see the page: the line at the top stops at 2 of 3 done. Last, see it on your store.

Nothing Shopify offers will tell us whether the sold-out button we are replacing was found, or whether a second one is hiding in a quick-add drawer somewhere on the page.

Open a product page whose selected variant is sold out, and look at it.

• The Notify control should stand where the sold-out button was. That is the ordinary result, and it is what the block is for. Pressing it should open your form, over the page, naming that product and that variant.
• If your theme has a sticky Add to Cart bar — the one that slides in as a shopper scrolls — its sold-out button becomes a Notify control too, and opens the same form. Scroll down the page to see it. That happens when the bar has its own Add to Cart form and when it is showing the same variant as the page. A bar built any other way keeps its button exactly as your theme draws it.
• Express-checkout buttons for a sold-out product go with the sold-out button. Shop Pay and the rest cannot buy something that is sold out, so they are hidden while the Notify control stands there, and come back with the Add to Cart.
• Nothing that can be bought is ever hidden. If the variant you switch to is in stock, the theme's own Add to Cart comes straight back. And if even one Add to Cart for the product on the page can still be pressed, the app hides nothing at all and puts the Notify control beside it.

If the Notify control appears beside the sold-out button instead of in place of it, your theme needs the side-by-side fallback and it is already using it. Everything works — a shopper can still ask, and the queue fills normally. It looks different, that is all. The app takes that route on its own when it cannot prove it is safe to hide anything, because breaking a page where somebody could have bought something is the one outcome worth avoiding at any cost.

Check each theme you publish. A theme is not approved once and for all: the block validates what it finds on the page it is on, every time, on every theme. If you change themes, look again.

Stopping it

Press Disable on the first step of the set-up page (open the step first if it is folded). Every Notify button on your store disappears at once, and Enable brings them back. (Taking the block out of your theme in Shopify, or pausing the form from its own page, also stops shoppers asking — pausing the form is exactly what Disable does.)

The people already waiting stay waiting, and they are still told when it is back in stock. That is deliberate: they asked, and taking the form down is not them changing their minds. If you want the queue to end, mark the variant discontinued — that tells everybody once and closes their requests.