Back-in-Stock enables you to automatically notify shoppers via SMS when out-of-stock products in your store come back-in-stock or when new products launch in your store (e.g. product drops).

Which platforms is Back-in-Stock compatible with?

Back-in-Stock is compatible with:

Important: your products need to have unique SKU’s for Back-in-Stock to function correctly with your e-commerce platform.

There are three steps required to set up Back-in-Stock:

Head over to the section “Back-in-Stock” in the Voyage app and click on the “Settings” button to start the setup process.

To create a better customer experience and engage with high intent buyers, instead of displaying “Sold Out” when a product is out of stock on your website, the Back-in-Stock feature will automatically replace this with a button that displays “Text me when available”.

When a shopper clicks on this button, they will see the following pop-up prompting them to enter their phone number to be notified when the product is back-in-stock.

Note: the same shopper cannot make two requests for the same variant with the same phone number. However, the shopper can submit multiple requests for the same product if each request is a different product variant.

To install the “Text me when available" button on your Shopify store, follow these instructions:

1. Turn on “Read access” for “Inventory” under API permissions

Without this permission enabled, you will not be able to send back in stock notifications to subscribers.

To find this permission, head to Settings > Apps and sales channels > Develop apps > select the Voyage app.

2. Update the "Sold out" button text

Head to Online Store > Themes > Actions > Edit languages > Products and then update the field under "Sold out" to "Text me when available"

3. Add the "Text me" pop-up code snippet

Head to Online Store > Themes > Actions > Edit code > Sections > product-template.liquid or similar.

Once in this section, follow the instructions outlined in the Voyage app to successfully install the code snippet that enables the pop-up where the customer can enter their phone number to appear successfully.

Once the code is successfully installed, the “Text me when available” button will automatically appear on every product page every time a product is out of stock.

Note: if you would like assistance with setting up Back in Stock, please contact our Customer Success at [email protected].

This is where you can configure the messages that are automatically sent to shoppers that request to be notified.

The message flow contains the following messages:

Sign Up Request: the message that non-existing subscribers will receive once they enter their phone number and request to be notified. Non-existing subscribers will be required to reply with “Y” to confirm their request.

Confirmation Message: the message that confirms the non-existing subscriber’s request after they reply with “Y”. If the shopper is an existing subscriber, they will simply receive the confirmation message and not the previous sign-up request message as they are already opted-in to your SMS program.

Back-in-Stock Message: the message that subscribers will receive once the product they requested goes back-in-stock.

These messages are already pre-populated with recommended text, but you can edit them as you please.

Under Inventory Settings, you can edit the rules for how and when to send back-in-stock notifications based on your inventory levels.

Firstly, to automatically notify subscribers when a product goes back-in-stock, make sure that “Enable Back-in-Stock notifications” is ticked.

Note: if “Enable Back-in-Stock notifications” is not ticked, the button “Text me when available” button will still appear on your website and you will still gather requests; the shoppers will simply not receive the “Back-in-Stock” message from the Message Flow.

When it comes to the notification rules, you have two options:

Let’s use an example to explain the powerful functionality of option 2.

Let’s say that you set the inventory parameter to “10 customers for every unit in stock” and a product goes from being out-of-stock to having 5 units in stock. This means that 50 subscribers (10 customers * 5 units) will be sent a back-in-stock message.

If you select “Oldest” as the order of sending notifications, then the first 50 subscribers that requested to be notified will be sent the “Back-in-Stock” message from the Message Flow. In contrast, if you select “Newest”, then the most recent 50 subscribers that requested to be notified will be sent the “Back-in-Stock” message.

Once these 50 subscribers have been notified, our system will then notify the next batch of subscribers based on the time window that you select. For example, if you select 15 minutes as the time window, our system will wait 15 minutes before calculating how many subscribers to notify in the next batch.

In our case, let’s say that 3 units were purchased after sending the back-in-stock message to the first batch of 50 subscribers. This means that there are only 2 units left in stock. Therefore, our system will notify 20 subscribers in the next batch (10 customers * 2 units).

This dynamic functionality avoids unnecessarily messaging all your subscribers and creating a bad experience.

The Back-in-Stock message is always sent between 8 AM PST and 6 PM PST as per A2P compliance regulations. This means that even if a product goes back in stock outside this window, the subscriber will only receive a message starting from 8 AM PST.

However, opt-in messages to receive Back-in-Stock notifications can occur outside this window since they are transactional (i.e. informative) rather than promotional (i.e. directing the subscriber to a link).

For example, let's say a subscriber submits their request to be notified when a product goes back in stock at 11:10 PM PST. Since this is a transactional message, the subscriber will immediately receive the confirmation message.

Let's assume that the product they subscribed to be notified for goes back in stock at 1 AM PST the following day. Since Back-in-Stock messages are promotional, the subscriber will only receive the message at 8:00 AM PST instead of 1:00 AM PST.

What do the different data points mean?

Open Requests: the current number of open requests for this product

Current Inventory: the current number of units in stock for this product

Total Requests: the total number of open requests that this product has ever received (historical count)