Alerts
Low-stock and out-of-stock alerts: the three severities, snoozing versus resolving, and how to stop the same warning arriving twice.
SimplifyStock → Alerts is where low-stock and out-of-stock warnings collect. The screen exists so the warnings accumulate somewhere you can triage, rather than arriving as email you archive and forget.
The three severities
Filter with All Severities, or pick one:
| Severity | What it means |
|---|---|
| Critical | Out of stock, or about to be |
| Warning | At or below the low-stock threshold |
| Info | Worth knowing, not urgent |
Severity is derived from the thresholds, so it moves when you change them. A product raising Critical alerts you do not consider critical usually needs its threshold adjusted on Inventory, not its alert dismissed.
Snooze, resolve, or mark read
Three different actions that are easy to confuse:
- Mark as read — you have seen it. The alert stays in the list; only the unread count changes. Mark All Read clears the count in one go.
- Snooze — you have seen it and decided to deal with it later. It leaves the active list and comes back.
- Resolve — the situation is handled. The stock is ordered, or the product is being discontinued and you do not want telling again.
The counters across the top — Unread, Resolved Today, All Alerts, Snoozed, Resolved — are the same list under different filters.
The distinction that matters is snooze versus resolve. Snoozing something you have actually fixed means it returns and wastes your attention a second time. Resolving something you have merely noticed means it never comes back and you find out when a customer does.
Why the same product does not alert twenty times
Alerts are de-duplicated over a window — by default 24 hours. One product having a bad week raises one alert, not one per sync.
If you are getting repeated alerts for the same product across days, the product is genuinely crossing and re-crossing its threshold. That is a threshold set too close to your normal stock level, and the fix is on the product, not here.
Email alerts
Low-stock emails are sent through your site’s own WordPress mail system, to the recipients you set under Settings. Nothing is routed through an external service.
To turn them on:
- Go to SimplifyStock → Settings.
- Tick Send local low-stock emails.
- Put one or more addresses in Alert recipients, separated by commas.
- Save changes.
If emails do not arrive, the cause is almost always your site’s mail configuration rather than SimplifyStock — WordPress sites on shared hosting frequently cannot send mail without an SMTP plugin. Troubleshooting covers the usual suspects.
A workable routine
- Filter to Critical and deal with those.
- Filter to Warning and either order, or raise the threshold if the alert was wrong.
- Mark All Read on what is left.
- Snooze only what you have genuinely deferred, and resolve only what you have genuinely finished.