Most inventory tools can tell you when stock is “low”. You set a threshold, and when a product drops below it, you get an alert. It feels like the job is handled. It is not, and here is why.
”Low” depends on how fast it sells
Say you set a low-stock alert at 10 units across your catalogue. For a product that sells 5 a day, 10 units is two days of stock. For one that sells half a unit a day, 10 units is nearly three weeks. The same threshold reorders one product far too late and the other far too early.
A fixed number cannot describe “low” for products that sell at different rates. Low is not a quantity. It is a point in time relative to how fast you are selling and how long the supplier takes to restock.
What a reorder point actually is
A reorder point is the stock level at which you need to order now so the delivery arrives before you hit zero:
Because it uses the product’s own sell rate and its supplier’s lead time, it is different for every product, and it moves as sales move. A product selling 5 a day with a 14-day lead time hits its reorder point at 70 units. A slow one might hit it at 4. No single threshold captures both.
Trigger is not the same as quantity
Even a correct reorder point only tells you when to order. It does not tell you how many. Those are two separate questions:
- When to order: the reorder point (this article).
- How many to order: the reorder quantity, which also factors in coverage and what is already incoming. We cover that in how much to reorder.
A low-stock alert gives you neither of these properly. It gives you a fixed line in the sand and leaves the actual decisions to you.
The point of all this
You do not want an alert that says “this is low”. You want a system that knows each product’s sell rate and each supplier’s lead time, works out when to reorder and how many, and shows you the arithmetic so you can override it when your judgement says otherwise.
That is the whole idea behind Restock Point: a reorder quantity for every product, from real sales, with the math laid out. It is $29 per month with a 14-day free trial.