Add a Back-in-Stock Notify Me Form to Shopify Pages

When a product sells out, shoppers have two choices: bookmark it and remember to check back, or leave and never return. Most leave. A back-in-stock notification form changes that equation — it turns a dead end into a warm lead and brings the exact shoppers who already wanted that product straight back when stock returns.

This guide walks through how Notify Me works, where the button and form appear on your product pages, and how to set it up with Timesact from scratch.

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A back-in-stock notification form is a lightweight email capture that appears on sold-out product pages. Instead of showing nothing when a variant is out of stock, your product page shows a “Notify Me” button. Shoppers click it, enter their email, and receive an automated email the moment that variant is available again.

Timesact manages the full loop: the button, the signup form, the waitlist, and the outbound email. It runs on its own — the notification fires automatically from Timesact when stock is restored, no separate email tool required to get started.

A few things worth knowing up front:

• Alerts go out by email, sent automatically by Timesact when stock returns.
• The feature is variant-level. You can enable it on a single size or colorway without affecting the rest of the product.
• Signups collect into a Timesact waitlist for each variant, which you can export whenever you want.

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The “Notify Me” button replaces the standard Add to Cart button on any variant that has zero inventory and has Notify Me enabled in Timesact. It appears exactly where Add to Cart normally sits, so the placement is already familiar to shoppers — no separate widget or floating bar.

Here is what each storefront state looks like depending on inventory:

The Notify Me button and the Coming Soon button are separate features. Coming Soon replaces the buy button with a non-clickable state that signals the product isn’t purchasable yet — it does not collect emails. Email capture for out-of-stock or upcoming products is always the Notify Me / Back in Stock feature.

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Setting up Notify Me in Timesact takes four steps. You do not need to touch your theme code.

Step 1 — Enable the Timesact App Embed

Open your Shopify Theme Customizer, go to the App Embeds tab, and activate the Timesact embed. This is the activation step that lets Timesact render on your storefront. Do it once and it covers all Timesact features.

Step 2 — Enable Notify Me on your products

In your Shopify admin, open the Timesact app and go to the Products tab. That’s where you turn Notify Me on for the products you want it on, with two ways to do it:

• By product — select individual products and enable Notify Me per variant.
• By collection — apply Notify Me to every out-of-stock variant in a collection at once.

The by-collection option is the fastest path for a large catalog. Any variant in that collection that hits zero inventory shows the Notify Me button automatically.

Step 3 — Set your button copy and your alert email

The copy lives in two places. In the Notify Me template, you set the button label and the success message a shopper sees after signing up — pick or create a Back in Stock template for the variants you’re enabling. In the Notifications tab, you set the back-in-stock email itself: the subject and body your subscribers receive when the variant returns to stock.

Each alert goes out for the specific variant the shopper asked about, so the back-in-stock email copy you write in the Notifications tab does a lot of the work in turning that alert into a return visit.

Step 4 — Test it on a real variant

Set a variant’s inventory to zero in Shopify. Load the product page in a new browser tab or in an incognito window. The Notify Me button should appear in place of Add to Cart. Enter a test email, confirm the success message appears, then restore inventory and verify the notification email fires. That completes the full loop.

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Once a shopper signs up through the Notify Me form, Timesact adds them to a waitlist for that specific variant. When you update inventory in Shopify — manually, through a purchase order sync, or via any integration that writes stock back to Shopify — Timesact detects the inventory change and sends the notification email automatically.

You do not trigger the send manually. The email goes out as soon as Shopify registers the variant as in stock, using the subject and body you set in the Notifications tab.

Shoppers receive one email per signup per restock event. If a product sells out again after restocking and a shopper signs up a second time, they receive a fresh notification on the next restock.

Your back-in-stock subscribers live in Timesact’s waitlist, which you can export as a CSV at any time — so if you run Klaviyo or another ESP, you can import that list to grow your email list with back-in-stock notifications and build segments around the products shoppers asked for.

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“Restock alert signup box” is another name for the same Notify Me form. When Timesact’s Notify Me is active on an out-of-stock variant, clicking the button opens the signup form so the shopper can enter their email and join the waitlist for that variant.

If you want to customize how the form looks, the button label and success message are editable in your Timesact template. You can match your store’s copy style — “Get notified when it’s back,” “Alert me,” “Join the waitlist” — whatever fits your brand voice.

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Once signups start coming in, you have a few ways to work with the subscriber data.

Export subscribers. Go to Timesact admin → Notify Me → Export to download a CSV of all subscribers for any product. This export is available regardless of whether a subscriber opted into your marketing newsletter — the Notify Me signup is a restock request, not a newsletter signup, and Timesact keeps them separate.

Bring subscribers into your ESP. Import the exported CSV into Klaviyo or another email tool to segment shoppers by the product they’re waiting on and fold them into your broader email program — the restock request becomes a signal your ESP can act on.

Review who’s waiting. The Notify Me section in Timesact admin shows your list of subscribers; search a specific variant to see who’s on its waitlist. That view is useful when you’re weighing restock quantities — the same waitlist thinking behind using back-in-stock alerts to plan restocks, pairing inventory planning with the email revenue the alerts bring back.

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Notify Me is ready to activate from inside the Timesact dashboard — no theme edits, no code, and no third-party email tool required to get started. Install Timesact on Shopify and turn your sold-out pages into a waitlist that brings shoppers back automatically. If you want a walkthrough of the setup for your specific catalog, book a free setup call and we will walk through it with you.

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