How does the back-in-stock notification form work? – Out of the Sandbox

November 20th, 2020: Your Back in Stock notification form may not be working due to a recent platform change. Check out this article on how to resolve the issue.

Activating the form

To activate this feature, open your Shopify admin and select Sales Channels > Online Store > Themes > Customize (indigo button) > Theme settings tab > Product grid and check the "Enable 'back in stock request' form" option, as shown here:

How to trigger the form

In order for the form to appear, your product must meet all of the following requirements under the "Inventory" section of the product management page:

The product must be active and available in the online store sales channel
Have the "Shopify tracks this product's inventory" inventory policy selected
Have a stock level of 0 or lower
Have the "Allow customers to purchase this product when it's out of stock" option DISABLED

If the form is not appearing on a product, double check that all of the requirements above are met.

If you are using a third party inventory, upselling or other app that affects the product form or inventory levels, the app may be interfering with the theme's ability to show the form. If you use an app such as these, please check with your app developer to verify it does not conflict with the theme code.

What happens when a user submits form

After a user fills out a back in stock notification form, an email will be sent to the customer facing email address on file notifying you that a user has requested a notification.

Please note this form may be subject to a security check feature if a single user submits multiple forms of any type on your store within 24 hour period.

Emails will come through with the subject line of "New customer message on..." followed by the date and time of submission. There is no way to change this subject line.

If you are not receiving the emails, double check that they are not being directed to your "spam" or "junk" folders. Also verify that the customer notification email in your Shopify settings is correct.

If your notification email does not include information such as the variant (size, color, etc.) of the product the customer is requesting, you will need to upgrade your theme.

If your product has custom fields or line item properties, this information will not be sent to you when a customer submits a request.

If you are not receiving email notifications, double check in your "junk" or "spam" folder or that the notifications are not being filtered.

Notifying customers manually

When an item comes back in stock, you will need to manually notify customers via email. There is no way for Shopify or Out of the Sandbox Shopify themes to send out automatic notifications.

Here are some tips on how to manage this:

Use your email program's folder or tagging system to label or sort email requests based on product, product category or other criteria. When the item becomes available again, open the folder or label filter and manually reply to each request. For faster processing, copy and paste the same message as a reply to every request.
Create a spreadsheet to track specific requests sorted by product, variant or other criteria along with the email address of each person who requests a notification. When an item comes back in stock, you can manually send out an email notification to all customers who requested notifications for that product or variant. We strongly recommend using the "BCC" field if you are sending out a large batch of notifications at once.
Manually add each customer's email address to a list or segment in your email marketing provider's system. Then, when the product comes back in stock, send everyone on that list or segment a notification using the email marketing system. For more details about lists, segmenting and sending notifications, contact your email provider for details.

Notifying customers automatically

If you would like to automate the process of notifying customers when items come back in stock, you may be able to do this with a third party app or custom code, but this is not included with your theme purchase.

Most of the time, these third party apps will replace the existing form and store the requester's email and other information elsewhere and handle sending out notifications as well.

However, for stores that have a relatively low number of requests such as these, it may be simpler to manually process your notifications.

While Out of the Sandbox is aware that having automatic notifications is a common customer request, there are some limitations with how themes interact with the Shopify platform that prevent this from being a feature we can add to our themes, so, at this time, we have no plans of offering an automatic notification feature.

We will continue, however, to monitor if changes in the Shopify platform are released that might make this possible for us to add in the future.

Form data

As outlined above, the form above simply sends the store owner an email notification. Please be aware that the system does not track which items are being requested or any other data. The only record of the request is the email notification the store owner receives. If you permanently delete this email, there is no way to retrieve the request.

Again, if you need more advanced tracking and analytics, you will need to consider a third party app.