How to Send Notifications for Back-in-Stock Products in WooCommerce

Back-in-stock notifications are a great way to keep your customers informed when their favorite products become available, improving the customer experience and discouraging them from shopping elsewhere.

WooCommerce doesn’t support this feature natively, so you’ll need a plugin to add this functionality. Fortunately, with the help of the right WooCommerce plugin, this couldn’t be easier, and you can set up back-in-stock notifications for your online store in a matter of minutes.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the many advantages of setting up back-in-stock notifications for your WooCommerce store, and how you can add this functionality easily with the help of a recommended plugin.

Why should you set up back-in-stock notifications for your WooCommerce store?

Setting up back-in-stock notifications for your WooCommerce products benefits your customers and your eCommerce store. Let’s take a look at just some of the benefits store owners can see as a result of adding back-in-stock notifications to their online stores:

Improve the customer experience

By providing customers with the opportunity to sign up for back-in-stock notifications, you will signal that their business is important to you. You also save them time by eliminating the need to periodically check your site to see if the product is in stock, improving the overall user experience for your store.

Recover lost sales

Most customers will leave your site and go elsewhere if they can’t find the product they want. Therefore, by offering back-in-stock notifications, you can reduce the risk of lost sales by providing customers with an alternative.

Create new marketing opportunities

As well as encouraging customers to return to your store to purchase the specific product they were looking for on their last visit, back-in-stock notifications can be an effective way to market other products you sell. Including coupon codes or offers in your back-in-stock notifications encourages customers to make additional purchases, boosting your average order value.

Make informed stocking decisions

Setting up back-in-stock notifications for your out-of-stock products lets you gauge customer interest in those products more accurately based on the number of people who sign up for the notifications. This will help you to make more informed decisions when restocking your inventory, saving money on products that don’t attract much interest, and investing it elsewhere.

Save staff and customers time

As well as avoiding the need for customers to enquire about stock availability, automating the process of sending back-in-stock notifications also saves your fulfillment staff time answering queries about when products will be available, allowing for a more streamlined fulfillment process.

Increase customer loyalty

Even if customers ultimately decide to purchase the out-of-stock product elsewhere, back-in-stock notifications are an opportunity to market to them and keep your business at the forefront of their minds. Sending consistent reminders to customers of your brand will encourage them to return to your store and potentially drive sales in the future.

How do you set up back-in-stock notifications in WooCommerce?

As we’ve mentioned, WooCommerce doesn’t offer the functionality to send back-in-stock notifications to your customers by default. To do this, you’ll need a plugin.

There is a wide range of WordPress plugins available that can provide a basic back-in-stock notifier message to send to your customers. However, if you are looking for a plugin that offers functionality beyond basic stock emails and messages, Flow Notify is a great solution.

Flow Notify enables you to send customers custom SMS, email, and WhatsApp messages from your WooCommerce store automatically, and supports both stock and order notifications, as well as instant and scheduled messaging. Let’s take a closer look at some of the features that make Flow Notify stand out as one of the top WooCommerce notification plugins on the market:

Automatic stock and order notifications – Flow Notify supports back-in-stock, out-of-stock, and on-sale notifications for your WooCommerce products on an opt-in basis, ensuring your customers remain informed about the availability of their favorite products. In addition, the plugin supports automatic order notifications triggered by changes in order status, enabling you to send regular updates to your customers and staff as orders progress through the fulfillment process.
Customizable notification messages – Flow Notify gives you total control over the content of your notification messages. You can pull in dynamic data using WooCommerce data fields to personalize your communication, and include information about upcoming offers when you send back-in-stock notifications to encourage customers to place orders. Flow Notify also supports a range of customization options to adjust the appearance of your notifications, enabling you to ensure that your business branding appears front and center when you communicate with potential customers.
Multiple notification types supported – Flow Notify supports notifications sent via email, SMS, and WhatsApp, ensuring your back-in-stock messages reach interested customers regardless of their preferred messaging platform. You can also send instant, scheduled, and automatic notifications. This feature makes Flow Notify a helpful tool for telling customers about upcoming offers using the details you captured when they initially placed their order or signed up for stock notifications.

This only scratches the surface when it comes to how Flow Notify can help to improve your store’s customer experience, fulfillment efficiency, and sales. Alongside the powerful notification functionality detailed above, Flow Notify enables you to take granular control over your order fulfillment process through the creation of custom order statuses. This ensures that every customer can be confident that as soon as your store has their favorite product back in stock, you’ll get it out to them as quickly as possible.

Step-by-step tutorial for setting up back-in-stock notifications with Flow Notify

Setting up back-in-stock notifications using Flow Notify is a very straightforward process. Simply follow the below steps to add stock notifiers to your WooCommerce store in a matter of minutes.

1. Download and install the plugin. Flow Notify is available for $49/year with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

2. From your WooCommerce dashboard, navigate to Flow Notify > Notifications and click ‘Add.’ From here, you can configure the options for your new back-in-stock notification as follows:

Add a name and recipient (either store admin or customer – for a back-in-stock notification, you’ll most likely want to set this as ‘Customer’).
Set the notification type (email notification, SMS message, or WhatsApp message).
Create your notification message using a combination of plain text and WooCommerce data fields. This enables you to pull in dynamic information like the customer’s billing name, specific product names, and information about promotions like coupon codes and sale prices.
Set the notification trigger – this enables you to set up a range of different types of notifications. For a back-in-stock notification, you’ll want to set this as ‘Customer Opted in.’

Configure a new back-in-stock notification with Flow Notify.

3. Next, navigate to Flow Notify > Settings. From the plugin settings page, you can configure settings like a specific timeframe for messages to be sent in (for example, if you only want to send notifications during the working day) and make global adjustments to your notification templates. You can also control the opt-in settings by clicking on the ‘Opt-ins’ tab.

On the ‘Opt-ins’ tab, check the box for ‘Enable notification opt-in on product pages’ and configure the message you want to display along with the opt-in button. You can also choose whether to show the notification opt-in button all the time or only when the product in question is out of stock.

4. Once you are happy with the notification settings, navigate to ‘Products’ from your WordPress dashboard and select the product you want to set up back-in-stock notifications for.

From the ‘Edit product’ interface, go to the Product data table and select the Flow Notify tab. From here, you can enable or disable three types of notifications:

Out-of-Stock Notification.
In Stock Notification.
On Sale Notification.

Check the box next to ‘In Stock Notification’ and choose your new notification from the dropdown menu.

Enable stock notifications for a specific product page with Flow Notify.

That’s it! Your customers will now be able to sign up to receive notifications whenever the stock status changes to ‘In Stock’ for any individual products on your WooCommerce store. Any customers who sign up for notifications regarding the product in question will be informed when the stock status changes to ‘In Stock’.

Improve your store’s customer experience and drive sales with back-in-stock notifications

The benefits of setting up back-in-stock notifications for your WooCommerce products are significant. It improves the customer experience, helps to recover lost sales, and creates new marketing opportunities. Even if your store doesn’t have a product in stock right now, you can let potential customers know as soon as you do.

Moreover, back-in-stock notifications help you improve your inventory decisions. The more data you collect, the more accurately you can gauge customer interest in those products, helping you with forecasting and planning.

While there are various plugins available that enable you to set up back-in-stock notifications, none of them have the flexibility and wide feature set of Flow Notify. With this powerful plugin, you can set up unlimited automatic stock and order notifications, keeping your customers informed when products become available and updating them as they move through your delivery process

Flow Notify also lets eCommerce stores take control of their message content and personalize it using WooCommerce data fields. This enables you to create custom message templates containing valuable, personalized information for customers on the status of their orders. This not only provides your customers with relevant, useful information, but also helps them to feel like valued customers.

With support for email, SMS, and WhatsApp messages, and powerful built-in features for order status management, Flow Notify offers a huge amount of value for the low price of $49/year. Try Flow Notify now with a 30-day money-back guarantee and see how it can level up the customer experience for your WooCommerce store.

Tutorials

How to Send Notifications for Back-in-Stock Products in WooCommerce