Running out of stock is not a failure. It is proof you built something people actually want.
The failure is what happens next: a shopper lands on your product page, sees a gray sold out badge, and leaves without a trace. Whether you are doing $20,000 a month or $2 million a month, that page leaks demand every single week.
Sandesh Kulai is the founder and CEO of Artos Software, the team behind STOQ, a Shopify app running preorders and back in stock alerts for more than 30,000 stores. Shopify named STOQ one of its Top 25 Built for Shopify apps, and merchants have given it a five star rating across 3,400+ reviews. Before he built apps full time, Sandesh worked inside Shopify and Dropbox, and it shows in how he frames the problem: not as a notification feature, but as a demand capture system.
In this conversation, Sandesh breaks down the full playbook for out of stock demand: when to collect full payment on a preorder versus a deposit, why partial payments only work on Shopify Payments, how to keep your 3PL and support team from tripping over preorder orders, why blasting all 10,000 people on a waitlist for 500 units is the wrong move, and how merchants are now wiring their preorder data into Claude through STOQ’s MCP server. Whether you are launching your first product or managing preorders across five markets, this is the system.
Let’s dive in. 👇
✅ Why hiding your sold out bestsellers is the worst option on the table: Shopify makes it a one click setting, plenty of merchants use it, and Sandesh makes the case that it quietly costs you more than the missed sale.
✅ The preorder payment decision most brands get backwards: Full payment upfront works for most categories, but there is one clear signal that tells you to switch to a deposit model instead.
✅ The Shopify Payments gotcha that stops preorder campaigns cold: One payment structure works with PayPal. The other one does not work with any gateway except Shopify Payments, and finding that out mid launch is expensive.
✅ Why 10,000 waitlist signups and 500 units in the warehouse is a customer experience problem: Most brands notify everyone at once. Sandesh explains what actually happens to the 9,500 people who show up too late, and the batching approach that fixes it.
✅ The one place preorder data has to live if your teams are going to work: Warehouse, 3PL, and support all need the same answer about a preorder order, and there is exactly one source of truth that gets it to all three.
✅ What merchants are actually building with an app’s MCP server: A record label store connected supplier street dates, product metafields, and preorder status into one automated flow. Sandesh describes it as the brand having “Claude’d their way” to a better customer experience.
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The idea Sandesh keeps returning to is one most operators have never said out loud: there is no version of your business where inventory is always available. You can forecast well, you can build great supplier relationships, and you will still run out. And when you do, it usually means the marketing worked. Someone told a friend, a creator posted, demand spiked, and your best product sold through. The question is not how to prevent that moment. It is what your store does with it.
Most stores do the wrong thing. They sort the sold out items down the page, or they use Shopify’s native setting to hide zero inventory SKUs entirely. Sandesh’s position is direct: never hide those products. The customer came looking for that specific thing. Brand loyalty is real, so they probably will not defect to a competitor, but they also will not go hunting for it. Leave the page up, capture the interest, and use that signal to decide what to reorder. For a small brand especially, that signup data is worth more than the sale, because it tells you which products to put money behind before you place the next purchase order.
The preorder conversation is where the operational detail gets useful. Sandesh’s default recommendation is to collect full payment upfront, because for most categories customers will pay and it keeps everything downstream simple. The exception is high ticket. He points to furniture brands, where asking a customer for $2,000 or $3,000 upfront is not realistic, so they take a $100 to $500 deposit and charge the balance right before shipping. There is a real constraint hiding in that choice: full payment preorders work with PayPal or Shopify Payments, but partial payments only work with Shopify Payments. On the plus side, Shopify vaults the card on the order, so there is no authorization window to manage and no expiring hold. When you are ready to ship, you click once and the remainder charges.
Then there is the part almost nobody plans for. A preorder order has to travel through your warehouse, your 3PL, and your support desk, and every one of those teams needs to know it is different. Sandesh’s answer is to push everything onto the Shopify order itself: tag it, add the expected ship date to the line item, include internal notes. He describes a brand last week whose support team runs on Gorgias, which STOQ does not integrate with yet. It did not matter. Because the preorder data lived on the order, they pulled it into a custom Gorgias widget and their agents could answer shipping questions immediately. The more Shopify native you are, he argues, the fewer integrations you actually need.
The last stretch of the conversation is where it gets forward looking. STOQ now ships an MCP server, a JavaScript SDK, and an action driven API, and Sandesh says a growing share of brands never open the dashboard at all. He describes a record label store that wired supplier street dates from product metafields into automated preorder campaigns, collection page updates, and a customer facing order status page, all without a human watching it. This is not a sales pitch. It is a working blueprint for treating your out of stock pages as the demand signal they have always been.
👉 Stop treating a stockout as a problem to hide and start treating it as data you are throwing away. Every shopper who hits a sold out page and leaves is a demand signal you never recorded. Keep the page live, put a capture mechanism on it, and let those signups tell you what to reorder instead of guessing from last quarter’s sales.
👉 Default to full payment on preorders, and let average order value tell you when to switch. For most categories, customers will pay in full for a product they already want, and it keeps fulfillment, accounting, and support simple. When the price climbs into four figures, that ask breaks down, and a deposit of $100 to $500 with the balance captured before shipping is the model that actually converts.
👉 Check your payment gateway before you plan the campaign, not after. Full payment preorders work with PayPal or Shopify Payments. Partial payments and deposits work with Shopify Payments only. If you are on a third party gateway and your launch plan depends on deposits, you have a platform decision to make before you have a marketing one.
👉 Put every preorder detail on the Shopify order and your integration problem mostly disappears. Tags, expected ship dates, and internal notes on the order become the single source of truth your 3PL, your WMS, and your helpdesk all read from. That is how one brand solved Gorgias support visibility without waiting for a native integration to exist.
👉 Notify your waitlist in batches sized to the inventory you actually received. If 10,000 people signed up and you restocked 500 units, emailing all 10,000 means roughly 9,500 people click through to a sold out page and have to resubscribe from scratch. Batching protects the customer experience and keeps the rest of your list intact for the next restock.
👉 Evaluate preorder apps on the workflow around the preorder, not the preorder button. Sandesh’s own three part test is ease of setup, quality of support, and whether the app handles what happens after the order: delay notifications, customer reminders, market and location rules. The button is table stakes. Everything after it is where brands get burned.
Sandesh Kulai
Founder and CEO, Artos Software (STOQ)
Sandesh Kulai is the founder and CEO of Artos Software, the bootstrapped team behind STOQ, the preorder and back in stock app now running on more than 30,000 Shopify stores. STOQ was recently named one of Shopify’s Top 25 Built for Shopify apps and carries a five star rating across roughly 3,400 merchant reviews, a combination very few apps in the ecosystem can claim.
His path into the problem is unusual. Sandesh and co-founder Kartik Luke Singh shipped their first Shopify app, an invoicing tool called Invoice Falcon, back in 2019 and later sold it. Sandesh then spent time inside Shopify, and before that Dropbox, which is where his instinct for how merchants actually use the admin came from. He returned to app building full time in 2022 and formed Artos Software, which now also operates Filemonk for digital product delivery.
What makes his perspective worth your time is that he is a product person and a developer talking about an operations problem. He is as comfortable explaining why Shopify vaults a card on a preorder as he is explaining why a first time merchant should look at waitlist signups before placing a purchase order. That range is why this conversation works for a store doing $20,000 a month and one doing $2 million.
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Steve Hutt
Well, hey there. Welcome back to eCommerce Fastlane. I am your host, Steve Hutt. Today’s conversation is all about what happens on your store when you have a product that is sold out. There’s another part to this solution that we’re going to dig into too, but you know that moment: a customer finds you through a friend, a creator, or whatever, then they hit the product page, see “sold out,” and literally leave.
Whether you’re doing $20,000 a month or $2 million a month, that page is leaking demand every week, and it’s costing you revenue and customer experience. That’s why I have my guest on today, Sandesh. He’s the founder and CEO of the team behind STOQ—spelled S-T-O-Q—a Shopify app under Arto Software.
Steve Hutt
It does a lot of different things, which I’m sure we’re going to unpack today. It does pre-orders, which is very interesting to me. We talked in the green room before recording about flash sales and what that means for creating pent-up demand. It also does back-in-stock alerts.
I think there are 30,000-some Shopify stores connected, and I believe it was recently named one of the top 25 Built for Shopify apps. That’s incredible recognition to have. By the end of this recording, I’m hoping you’ll know where pre-orders fit in the demand stage of your business, and maybe how a waitlist can tell you something before you place your next purchase order. We talk about forecasting a lot.
Hi, Sandesh. Welcome to eCommerce Fastlane.
Sandesh Kulai
Hey, thanks for having me. That was an incredible intro.
Steve Hutt
I’m hired, right?
Sandesh Kulai
Yeah. I hope I can live up to the promise. We’ve done pre-orders and back-in-stock alerts for a long time now. We work with a ton of different brands at different scales, and I’ve learned a lot in the process. I’m hoping I can be of good service today.
Steve Hutt
Absolutely. Let’s go back a bit and talk about the actual stockout problem. I think you have an interesting story with a co-founder and everything. I really want to understand the problem you found that led you to build this company and product.
Sandesh Kulai
Definitely. I’ve shared this before as well: I really don’t think there’s a good solution to inventory problems.
Steve Hutt
Mm-hmm.
Sandesh Kulai
A lot of times, people think about inventory optimization as making sure you consistently have inventory coming in and that your products are always available. But I don’t think that’s a very sustainable or realistic approach. At some point, you will run out of inventory. And I hope you do, because that means you have a great product, right?
Steve Hutt
Right.
Sandesh Kulai
You have something that people actually want to buy. If that’s the case, customers are going to land on a page where they aren’t able to purchase. There’s so much of it outside of your control. You can have an incredible marketing moment when you have inventory, people tell their friends to go buy it, and then they end up on the page with no way to purchase it.
You just can’t reach a point where inventory is always available. That’s what fascinated us, and we ended up building a very simple tool to help merchants capture that demand.
Sandesh Kulai
That’s what we originally started STOQ with about four years ago. We thought, very simply, we’ll add a “Notify Me” button to your store. It doesn’t matter whether you’re preparing for a launch or you don’t have inventory. We’ll help you capture that demand so you can notify customers when it’s back in stock.
One of the data points that led us here is that back-in-stock alert emails and notifications tend to have the highest conversion rate. It beats any other type of email—literally any other type.
Steve Hutt
Yeah.
Sandesh Kulai
That’s because the intent is so high for a customer signing up for a back-in-stock alert. They’re coming in with the idea that, “I’ve signed up to buy this product.” So when the notification lands, they’re just going to buy it.
The emails are designed so it’s one click of a button and you’re straight at checkout with that product in your cart. There are no extra steps or decisions about what else to add to the cart. You can do that if you want, but it’s very straightforward to get to checkout.
That’s what got us to building the product in our first two years. Along the way, we learned a lot about what out-of-stock products actually are. Some are out of stock because you’re regularly running out of inventory and want to capture demand. The other side is that you don’t really have stock yet—you have an idea for a product and want to sell it. There might be products customers want to buy before you have inventory available.
Steve Hutt
Right.
Sandesh Kulai
Before you notify them.
Steve Hutt
Right.
Sandesh Kulai
So we went from out-of-stock products with a “Notify Me” button, to out-of-stock products with pre-orders, to launching products with pre-orders. That’s where we are today. We’ve moved from being just about back-in-stock alerts to doing both really well.
We’re also adding a third layer to help merchants understand their data better. Most solutions in the space help you capture a signup, notify customers, maybe track the order, and that’s pretty much it. But there’s a lot more data in between. They landed on your page—did they click the button? Did they sign up? How many times did they go back and forth? Across what products is this happening? Over what time frame? Which products are most interesting to restock later?
Steve Hutt
Yeah.
Sandesh Kulai
We’re building an analytics platform on top. Analytics always sounds fancy, but we’re really just showing you what customers are doing on your store in a very simple way. That’s the other part of STOQ today. We’re trying to give merchants that information in the best possible way we can.
Let’s say you start a pre-order campaign with STOQ. Our dashboard can tell you how many customers saw it, how many clicked to purchase, how many had it in their cart but abandoned, and how many actually ordered. If you’re a brand doing tons of pre-orders—which happens a lot, especially in the trading card games category, where you have lots of sets being launched and they tend to be pre-order—it’s really good to know which campaigns are doing better than others. Then you know what to look forward to next or what theme to launch when new sets are released.
Those are roughly the three things we’re working on at STOQ and trying to improve. I know that was a lot.
Steve Hutt
No, it’s interesting. I wrote some notes down because old school, we used to think, “If something’s out of stock, can we do some kind of product-page or collection-page sort so we can move products below the fold because we want people to buy things that are in stock?”
There are tools that let you do that, pushing things down. Even crazier, I’m sure you’ve seen people temporarily hiding out-of-stock SKUs. That’s kind of a native Shopify feature: do you want to hide the SKU if inventory is zero?
I know you’re not an inventory app, so make the case for why you’re not here to hide best-selling products. How are you able to delicately provide a great customer experience, say, “Fair enough, it’s not in stock right now,” capture that demand, and then fulfill it later?
Sandesh Kulai
That’s pretty much all it is. At the end of the day, a customer is coming to a store with the intent to purchase something they’ve heard of or seen. If you try to hide it from them, they’re just going to bounce and move somewhere else.
In today’s day and age, people have a lot of brand loyalty, so I don’t think you have to be as worried about a potential customer moving to another brand. But they also don’t have the patience to wait forever, search for it, or spend a lot of energy searching for it.
If it were up to me, and if I were running a brand, my advice would be to never hide out-of-stock products. Keep those pages open. Instead, capture that interest and understand how much interest actually exists. You could also use that as a surface to showcase other products that might be in stock. It still matters to capture some kind of order or purchase from a customer landing on the page.
The customer is there for the product they actually searched for. If you’re not capturing that interest, I think you’re losing out on a sale. You’re losing out on a customer experiencing the product and potentially bringing in even more. There are a lot of network effects happening with every customer experience.
Steve Hutt
Yeah.
Sandesh Kulai
I think it’s really important to give customers the experience they’re looking forward to. I often draw the parallel to software. If you use any software application and it does a horrible job presenting information or controls, you’re just going to leave because you don’t have time to wait for it.
But if it shows you what you’re interested in right away—for example, you want to start recording a podcast and it’s literally one button click, everything is configured, and you’re good to go—there’s a very good chance you’ll use that app to record a podcast.
It’s the same with going to a store and looking for a product. You want to get out of the way and present the product to the customer as quickly as possible. Assuming they’re still interested because they searched for it, capture the demand if you don’t have the product. You don’t have to promise anything. You’re just capturing demand, and you can use that to understand what you actually need to restock next time.
Sandesh Kulai
For small brands, that information is extremely valuable. In the early days, you don’t know which products work
