Help · Content

Back in stock — groups and holding

When something comes back, the people waiting are notified in order, a few at a time, and your store is checked again between each group.

That is the whole mechanism, and this page is about the three numbers behind it and the one promise it makes.

Content → Back in stock → Settings.

How many at a time

How many at a time — five to begin with, anywhere from 1 to 200. The note under the box says the range:

People notified per group. 1 to 200.

And one sentence under the pair says why they exist:

Small groups, spaced out. We check your store right before every email, so at most one group can be notified after the last unit sells.

Set it against your restocks rather than against your queue. Three units back and a group of fifty means forty-seven people hear about something that has already gone; three units back and a group of five means five people hear about it and four of them may still miss out, which is a much smaller kind of disappointment.

The gap between groups

How long between groups — forty-five to begin with, anywhere from one minute to seven days.

Minutes between groups. 1 minute to 7 days.

The gap is not a delay for its own sake. It is the time the first group has to act, and it is what makes the check between groups mean anything: if the first five buy the last three units, the sixth person is never notified, because by then your store says there is nothing there.

What the guarantee actually is

Said plainly, because this is the part it would be easy to overclaim:

At most one group of people can be notified after the last unit sells.

Not zero. One. Here is why, and the honest version is short: your store tells us stock has changed and we act on the last thing we were told. Stock can disappear while a group's email is in flight, or in the seconds between our last check and Shopify's own message reaching us. A group can therefore go out about something that has just gone.

What that buys you is the thing the size of the group controls. A group of five means at most five people can be notified too late. A group of two hundred means at most two hundred. Nothing reserves stock for anyone.

And the first group is not instant. When something comes back, the first group goes out within the next minute or so, not the next second. That is inside the promise above, not outside it.

Holding a restock

Hold every restock for me stops the groups before the first one:

Nothing goes out until you press Notify, on every variant.

Fifty units coming back is a different decision from three, which is the whole reason the switch exists.

A held restock appears under Restocks waiting for you with the size of its queue and a Notify button. Nobody has been emailed. Nobody loses their place. You look at the queue, and you decide.

Two things worth knowing about it:

• Holding does not change who is notified, only when. The order is the order people asked in, and it does not move.
• You can hold one variant rather than all of them, from the row menu on Demand. A variant set that way ignores the store-wide switch; Follow the store setting in the same menu puts it back, and that one takes the same permission as your other store settings.

Pressing Notify releases that one restock. The first group goes out within the next minute or so, and the ordinary gap applies from there.

Holding a restock that is already running stops the groups after the one that is going out. The group already in flight is sent.

Paging. When several restocks are waiting you choose how many to show at a time — 25, 50 or 100 per page — and step through with Previous and Next. The line beside them says where you are: Page 2 of 3, and there is a box to jump straight to a page. The page you are on is part of the address, so opening a queue and coming back puts you back where you were. The count on the switch is every held restock in your store, not the ones on this page.

Per-variant overrides

The row menu on Demand holds one override — the hold. The group size and the gap are the store's, and one variant cannot have its own today.

Who can change what

The wave settings and the store-wide hold are your store's settings, so a manager or your owner changes them. A marketer and a viewer see the same page and the same values, read-only, with a line saying who can change them. Follow the store setting is one of them, because it hands a variant back to your store's rule — and with the store-wide hold off, that variant's next restock emails its first group on its own.

Notify and a hold on one restock are not settings, and they sit the other side of that line: each is a decision about who this restock emails, so each needs the same permission as sending a campaign — a marketer, a manager or your owner. Stopping mail should never be harder than starting it, so anybody who can press Notify can also hold the thing they were about to send.