A back in stock notification is an automated message sent to a customer letting them know that a product they were interested in, which was previously sold out, is available again.
The Rare Email That Starts With the Customer's Own Request
Most automated email is triggered by something the store decides, a schedule, a sale, a promotion. What is a back in stock email doing differently is starting from an explicit request the customer made themselves: they saw a sold-out product, cared enough to leave their email address for it, and are now waiting to hear back. That single detail changes everything about how this message should be written, since there’s no need to generate interest, only to deliver on interest that already exists.
Why the Alert Can't Afford to Wait
A back in stock alert that goes out hours or days after inventory actually updates is quietly wasting the exact intent it was built to capture. Popular restocks can sell out again within minutes, especially for limited-run or frequently backordered items, which makes the gap between “inventory updates” and “email sends” one of the more consequential timing windows in ecommerce email. A restock notification email built on a manual process, someone checking inventory and sending a campaign by hand, almost always loses this race against a fully automated one.
What the Message Itself Needs to Do
Back in stock email examples that convert well share a few things in common:
- The actual product image and price, front and center.
- A single direct link straight to purchase, rather than a general store link.
- A note that stock is limited this time around, if applicable.
None of this requires persuasion in the way a typical marketing email does, since the recipient already decided they wanted the item before the message was ever sent. The job here is removing friction between “I’m notified” and “I bought it,” not creating desire from scratch.
The Numbers That Explain Why This Email Gets Priority
Omnisend’s ecommerce benchmark data found:
- 59 percent open rate for back-in-stock emails.
- 5 to 6 percent conversion rate, identifying them as the single highest-converting automated email type of any category tracked in 2025.
- 22 percent conversion, per a MarketingSherpa case study.
- 14 percent average, per Barilliance’s broader research, roughly double the 8 percent baseline across all email campaign types combined.
Whatever the exact figure for a given store, the pattern holds consistently across every source: back in stock notification performance sits well above almost any other automated email a store can send, which is exactly why it’s usually one of the first automations worth setting up rather than an afterthought.
Related terms:
Adflipr’s automation workflows can trigger back in stock notifications automatically once inventory data syncs from a connected Shopify or WooCommerce store.
