Configuration
Lead times, safety stock and the settings that change what the reorder list tells you.
Everything here lives under WooCommerce → SimplifyStock → Settings. The defaults will produce a working reorder list, but two of them — lead time and service level — change the output enough that they are worth setting properly before you act on anything.
Lead time
How long it takes stock to arrive after you place an order, in days.
Set a global default, then override it per supplier or per product. The override chain is:
product lead time
└─ falls back to supplier lead time
└─ falls back to global default (7 days)Lead time drives the reorder point directly: a product with a 30-day lead time must be reordered far earlier than an identical product with a 3-day lead time, even though they sell at the same rate.
Be honest rather than optimistic here. If a supplier says five days and delivers in twelve, use twelve — the forecast cannot know about the difference and will let you run out.
Service level
The probability that you do not stock out during a lead time. Higher means more safety stock and more capital tied up.
| Service level | Roughly means | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| 90% | Out of stock ~1 lead time in 10 | Slow movers, easy to reorder |
| 95% | Out of stock ~1 in 20 | The default. Sensible for most catalogues |
| 99% | Out of stock ~1 in 100 | Products you cannot be seen to be out of |
Set it globally and override it for the handful of products where the answer is genuinely different. Setting 99% across the whole catalogue is a common and expensive mistake — it inflates safety stock everywhere to protect against a risk that only matters on a few lines.
Safety stock
By default this is calculated from demand variance and your service level. You can override it with a fixed quantity per product when you have a reason the maths cannot know about — a contractual minimum, a shared component, a supplier who ships in pallets.
A fixed override switches that product off automatic safety stock entirely. It will not adapt to a change in demand, so revisit overrides periodically.
Sync schedule
| Setting | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Incremental sync | Hourly | Reads orders since the last run |
| Full re-forecast | Nightly | Rebuilds every model |
| History window | 12 months | Longer captures seasonality; costs sync time |
On a store doing under a thousand orders a month, the defaults are fine. Above that, move the full re-forecast to your quietest hour.
Alerts
Pro can push the reorder list to email or Slack. Two things to decide:
- Threshold — send when a product’s days of cover drops below this. Default is the reorder point, which means “send when it needs ordering”.
- Digest or immediate — a daily digest is right for almost everyone. Immediate alerts on a catalogue of any size become noise within a week, and noise gets muted.
Configuring with WP-CLI
wp simplifystock config set lead_time_days 14
wp simplifystock config set service_level 0.95
wp simplifystock config get --format=tableUseful for staging environments and for keeping settings in a deployment script rather than in someone’s memory.