The flat-number trap
Almost every store starts with one number. Alert me when anything drops below ten units. It is simple, it is easy to explain, and it is wrong in both directions at once.
On a product selling fourteen units an hour, ten units is about forty minutes of warning, and you will spend most of that forty minutes finding out whether anyone can act. On a product selling two units a month, ten units is five months of warning, delivered as an interruption, every single day, until someone mutes the channel.
Think in time, not units
The question a low-stock alert should answer is not "how many are left" but "how long until this is gone". Those are the same question only if everything sells at the same rate, which nothing does.
So set your threshold as a multiple of recent sales velocity:
- Take the last 7 days of unit sales for the variant.
- Divide by 7 to get a daily rate.
- Multiply by your restock lead time in days, then add a buffer.
A product selling 20 a day with a 5-day lead time and a 50 percent buffer wants a threshold around 150 units. The same rule on your slow mover gives you a threshold of 2, and the channel goes quiet.
The three exceptions
- New products have no history. Use a fixed number for the first fortnight, then let velocity take over.
- Launch products break their own averages by design. Watch them manually around a drop: averages need history that a launch, by definition, does not have.
- Seasonal spikes make a 7-day window lag reality. Going into your peak, shorten the window to 3 days so the threshold climbs with demand.
Look at your last five stockouts. If the alert fired less than one lead time before you ran out, your threshold was too low. The alert was technically correct and practically useless.
What to do about the noisy tail
Most catalogues have a long tail of products that will never justify an interruption. Do not tune them. Exclude them. Set a rule for your top fifty SKUs by revenue, and let everything else appear in the daily summary instead.
The goal is not complete coverage. It is that when the channel makes a noise, somebody looks up.
How Store Huddle surfaces low-stock alerts is covered in the help centre.