Hi there,
The first three recipes were about listings. This one is about stock.
Today: a low-stock alert that goes only to you.
If you've ever found out a bestseller was sold out because a customer asked, this one's for you. You keep a short Google Sheet of the listings you care about and the quantity that should worry you (say, 3). Make checks your stock once a day (for example 7:00 AM your time; not more often on Make Free). When one is at or below your number, you get one email at your own address.
It doesn't change stock or prices, and it never emails buyers.
What you'll need
- Make's free plan, the watch-list Sheet template, and Gmail sending to yourself. Make Free gives you 1,000 credits a month[price-check] and appears to allow only 2 active scenarios, according to a Make community forum report (not a Make pricing or help page). If you plan to run several of these recipes at the same time, that 2-scenario limit could matter. Checking 15 listings once a day uses about 500 of 1,000 credits a month (estimate, if run alone).
- About 30 minutes for setup (our estimate)
How you'll know it's working
Temporarily set one row's threshold higher than its current stock and click Run once. One email should arrive, addressed only to you, naming the listing and the quantity. Listings above their threshold send nothing. Then set the number back.
The three things most likely to trip you up
- No alert even though stock is low. The wrong quantity field is mapped. Open the run in Make's history, look at the raw data, and map the total sellable quantity.
- The same alert every run. Add the optional last_alerted_at step so it doesn't repeat.
- Credits going fast. Usually you're checking every listing instead of a short watch-list, or running more than once a day. Keep the watch-list to 20 key listings or fewer and run once a day.
Time saved: about 45 minutes a week, Estimated. That assumes about 15 items you'd otherwise check by hand, about 1.5 minutes each, two full checks a week: 15 items × 1.5 minutes × 2 checks a week = 45 minutes. The alert checks once a day, which is more often than most people check by hand. We only count the two manual checks a week it replaces, so we don't overstate the saving. The bigger win for many sellers is catching a sell-out before it happens, and we don't try to put a number on that.
[TEST STATUS: Not yet tested. Replace with "Last tested: {date} (live-tested)" from the PASS log before this sequence goes live.]
Next lesson: your first order recipe, a tidy order log that fills itself in.
Talk soon, Jesse at Automate Your Hours