Shopify Flow Templates for Inventory Management
Ten ready-to-import Flow workflows that take the stock babysitting off your desk — low-stock alerts, out-of-stock tagging, supplier reorder emails and ad pausing. Each one ships as JSON you paste straight into Flow.
- 10 workflows, each with copy-paste JSON and setup notes
- Variant-level triggers, not just product-level
- Written for small-batch producers, not enterprise catalogues
- Free to download — no trial required
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What's included
Ten workflows, four jobs
Every one of these exists because someone was doing it by hand — refreshing the admin to check a count, remembering to email a supplier, noticing a week late that ad spend was going to a product nobody could buy.
Know before you're out
Threshold alerts that reach you rather than waiting to be found — and you can set a different threshold for a fast mover than for a long-tail SKU.
- Low-stock email alerts, variant-level
- Slack alerts for critical stockouts
- Variant-level low-stock thresholds
Tags that maintain themselves
Operational tags applied automatically, so collections, badges and feed rules stay right without anyone remembering to update them.
- Auto-tag out-of-stock products
- Auto-tag stale products (90+ days)
- Restocked merchandising tags
Reordering that doesn't wait on you
Hit a reorder point and the supplier hears about it, whether or not you were at your desk. The customer waiting for a restock hears about it too.
- Notify supplier at reorder point
- Back-in-stock customer notifications
- Stockout frequency counter (metafield)
Stop paying for what you can't ship
Out-of-stock products tagged for exclusion from your shopping feeds, so ad budget stops flowing to a listing that can't convert.
- Tag for Google Merchant Center exclusion
- Tag for catalogue feed exclusion
- Untag automatically on restock
What you'll need
- Shopify Flow enabled on your store. Flow isn't included on every Shopify plan — check yours before you start, because the templates are useless without it.
- Inventory tracking switched on for your variants. Flow can only act on quantities Shopify is actually counting.
- Optional: Slack for alerts, an email platform for back-in-stock notifications, and Google Merchant Center if you're running shopping ads.
Start with two or three. Ten automations arriving at once is how you end up muting the alerts you set up last week.
Where Flow stops
Flow is a genuinely good automation engine, and it has one hard boundary: it acts on what Shopify knows. Shopify knows how many finished units are on a listing. It doesn't know what those units are made of, how much of each input you hold, or how many more you could build if you wanted to.
So a low-stock alert on a finished product is useful and slightly late. By the time the listing is down to three, the question that matters isn't "are we low" — it's "can we make more this week", and that depends on materials Shopify has never seen. If the answer is no, the alert has told you about a problem you can no longer prevent.
The same boundary shows up in costing. Flow can tag a product as a slow mover; it can't tell you that product is your least profitable one, because Shopify holds revenue and not cost per unit. And if you sell anywhere besides Shopify, Flow only ever sees the Shopify half of your stock position.
None of that is a criticism — it's a division of labour. Flow reacts to what Shopify knows. Something upstream has to decide what Shopify knows. Stocksmith is built for that upstream job: materials and bills of materials, production runs that deduct automatically, a low-stock level on the material so you get warned while there's still time to order, real cost per unit, and Stock Push sending current counts out to your channels.
If you want the full walkthrough of setting the first automations up, our guide to Shopify Flow inventory automations covers five of them step by step. For the materials layer underneath, start with tracking material inventory alongside Shopify.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Shopify Flow?
Shopify Flow is Shopify's own automation tool. You build workflows out of a trigger (something happens in your store), conditions (checks that decide whether to continue) and actions (tag a product, send an email, update a metafield). For inventory work the useful triggers are the inventory-quantity ones, which let a workflow react when a variant drops below a level you've set. It isn't available on every Shopify plan, so check yours first.
How do I import these templates into Flow?
Each template in the kit comes as a JSON workflow definition plus notes on what to change. You create a new workflow in Flow, paste the JSON in, then edit the parts that are specific to you — your threshold numbers, your notification address, your tag names. Turn one on, watch it for a few days, then add the next. Every workflow in the kit is independent, so you can take three and ignore the rest.
What low-stock threshold should I set?
Not a round number — a number derived from how fast the product sells and how long it takes you to make more. If a product sells eight units a week and a production run takes two weeks from ordering materials, a threshold of five is an alert you can't act on. Work out your reorder point per product, and set the threshold there rather than wherever feels tidy.
Can Flow track my raw materials?
Not really. Flow acts on what Shopify holds, and Shopify holds finished-goods quantities. People do sometimes list materials as unsold products to get a count into Shopify, but it's a workaround that breaks as soon as one material feeds several products — nothing deducts it when you make a batch. If materials are what you need to watch, that layer belongs in a system that understands bills of materials.
Do these replace an inventory management system?
No, and they're not trying to. These automate the reactions to your Shopify stock levels — alerting, tagging, notifying. They don't produce the numbers, cost anything, or see past Shopify. If you resell finished goods on one channel, Flow plus decent habits may genuinely be enough. If you manufacture, or sell in more than one place, the counts themselves need an owner and Flow isn't it.
How does this work alongside Stocksmith?
They sit either side of the same line. Stocksmith owns the numbers — materials, bills of materials, production runs, cost per unit — and Stock Push sends current finished-goods counts out to your Shopify store. Flow then works on the storefront side: tagging, alerting, feed management. You get warned about a material before it stops a batch, and Shopify stays tidy on its own.
The layer underneath
Flow keeps your storefront tidy. Stocksmith keeps it true.
Automating your Shopify reactions is worth doing. But an alert fired off a wrong count is just a faster route to the wrong conclusion, and Shopify's count is only as good as the last time someone updated it by hand.
Stocksmith holds each product as a bill of materials. Record a production run and every material comes out of stock at its current landed cost. Set a low-stock level on the material itself and you get warned while there's still time to order, rather than when the finished product has already run dry. Stock Push sends the current counts out to Shopify so Flow has something accurate to react to.
No credit card required. Stock Push is available from the Indie plan up.
Flow handles
- Alerts and notifications off Shopify stock levels
- Tagging, collections and merchandising rules
- Feed exclusions for out-of-stock products
Stocksmith handles
- Raw materials and multi-level bills of materials
- Production runs, with materials deducted automatically
- Real cost per unit and COGS across every channel
- One stock pool behind all your sales channels
Related resources
Free Checklist
15-Minute Shopify Inventory Tune-Up
Seven short checks that stop stock counts, listings and material levels drifting between now and your next sale.
Free Template
Shopify Inventory Spreadsheet
Track the materials, production runs and COGS that Shopify never sees, in Excel or Google Sheets.
Guide
How to Track Low Stock in Shopify
What Shopify's own low-stock tooling does, where it stops, and how to cover the gap.