# Inventory and Restock Alerts *AI for E-commerce* Find out you are running out before the customer does Stockouts are usually discovered by a customer trying to buy. By then the sale is gone, the listing may have lost its ranking, and the reorder has not started.,Your employee watches stock levels against how fast things actually sell, so the alert arrives with enough lead time to reorder rather than as a notification that you already ran out.,It also watches the other direction: the products sitting still, tying up cash and warehouse space, that nobody thinks about because they are not causing a problem. ## Benefits ### undefined ### undefined ### undefined ### undefined ## How It Works 1. **Step 1**: 2. **Step 2**: 3. **Step 3**: 4. **Step 4**: ## At a Glance - **Velocity** Alerts timed to sell-through - **Lead time** Built into the warning - **Both ends** Stockouts and dead stock - **Ahead** While you can still reorder ## A Fixed Threshold Is the Wrong Alert Almost every store platform offers a low-stock alert set at a fixed number, and almost nobody finds it useful for long. Set it at five and your fast movers sell out before the alert is even actioned. Set it at fifty and your slow movers alert constantly for stock that represents a year of cover. Either way people learn to ignore the notification, which is the worst outcome since the mechanism now exists and does nothing. The threshold has to be expressed in days of cover rather than units, and days of cover requires knowing the sell-through rate. ## Lead Time Is Half the Calculation Knowing you have eight days of stock left is only useful alongside how long a reorder takes to arrive. With a three-day supplier that is comfortable. With a six-week import it means you ran out a month ago and have not noticed yet. This is why a stock alert that ignores lead time is not really an early warning at all, and it is the most common reason a store that had an alerting system still ran out. The number that matters is days of cover minus lead time, and that is the number the alert should be firing on. ## Dead Stock Never Raises Its Hand Stockouts announce themselves eventually, through a failed sale or an angry customer. Slow-moving stock never does. It sits quietly, fully paid for, occupying space and working capital, and because it causes no visible problem it goes unexamined for years. For a small store where cash flow is the actual constraint, that silent pile is often a larger problem than the occasional stockout, and the only way it surfaces is if something is deliberately looking for it. ## FAQ ### Is this different from my store low-stock alert? Yes, and the difference is the whole point. A platform low-stock alert fires at a fixed number you set once, which is either far too early for a slow product or far too late for a fast one. Timing it against actual sell-through and supplier lead time is what makes the alert actionable rather than noise you learn to dismiss. ### Does it place reorders? It prepares the reorder with the quantity and the deadline. Committing money to a supplier is a decision that stays with you, and a general instruction to keep stock healthy is not approval for a specific purchase. ### What about seasonal products? Recent velocity alone is misleading for seasonal lines, since demand for them was low last month by design. Where there is enough history the seasonal pattern is used instead, and where there is not, that is stated rather than treated as a confident forecast. ### Can it see stock across several channels? It reads what the connected store exposes. Where you sell across several channels with separate stock pools, say so during setup, because a single pooled number hides exactly the shortage you need to see.