How K Place fixed false restock alerts and generated ~$13K with STOQ

K Place is a K-Pop retailer with two physical stores in Southern California and a global Shopify Plus store. Customers regularly sign up to be notified when sold-out products come back in stock.

But there was a problem.

K Place's previous back-in-stock setup used Shopify's aggregate inventory across locations. So when a product was restocked at one location, it could trigger an alert to customers in markets where the product was still unavailable online.

Customers would click the email expecting to buy the product, only to find it was still out of stock.

"We were sending a lot of false positives to customers, and they were not happy about that. We weren't happy about that either." - Kevin, K Place

For K Place, that was a particularly important problem to solve. Someone who signs up for a back-in-stock alert is already a high-intent customer.

"You're talking about a very high intent purchase group with back in stock alerts, and you want to be 100% sure that these things are firing off correctly."

K Place needed a way to make its restock alerts more accurate across locations without building and maintaining the functionality itself.

Why K Place chose STOQ

K Place considered whether to build an internal solution or use an app focused specifically on back-in-stock notifications.

The team ultimately chose to outsource it.

"Our basic philosophy is if it's something customer-facing, we prefer to outsource it to an app where the developers are 100% focused on making sure that things are operational and working clean."

K Place implemented STOQ for its back-in-stock notifications while continuing to use Klaviyo to send the emails.

The key difference was that STOQ could handle the inventory logic at the location level, so inventory becoming available at one location didn't incorrectly trigger an online restock alert.

The back-in-stock flow became K Place's top-performing email flow

Once the alerts were working correctly, K Place could see how much demand was sitting behind its sold-out products.

In 90 days, customers submitted more than 12,500 back-in-stock signups.

During the same period, STOQ recorded:

• 3,743 back-in-stock notifications sent
• 163 orders attributed to those notifications
• ~$13K in revenue attributed to STOQ

The flow also performed exceptionally well in Klaviyo.

$4.86 revenue per recipient

Klaviyo reported $4.86 in revenue per recipient for K Place's back-in-stock flow, making it the store's highest-performing automated email flow on that metric.

It was KPlace's highest-performing automated flow, beating its welcome, browse, cart, and checkout flows on revenue per recipient.

Kevin explains why:

"When we restock, it's the chief mechanism by which customers are notified that they can purchase this thing. So high intent purchasers."

The people receiving these emails had already told K Place exactly what they wanted and asked to be notified when they could buy it.

Built-in analytics gives K Place a clearer view of demand

K Place also values STOQ's built-in analytics. Kevin said the reporting gives his team a more granular view of demand than, including which variants customers are waiting for and how many people are on each waitlist.

That information becomes useful when K Place is deciding how much inventory to order for a product's reprint or rerun. Because demand can drop sharply after an initial K-Pop release, the number of customers still waiting gives the team another signal for forecasting.

For example, if 200 people are still waiting for a product, K Place can look at its historical ratio of notifications sent to resulting sales and determine that ordering at least 50 units is probably reasonable.

“Analytics of course is very important. Having it built in is helpful.”

For KPlace, reliability means not having to think about it

For K Place, the value isn't only in the sales generated by restock alerts.

Kevin also values not having to constantly monitor the system.

"As a business owner, if something is just working and you don't have to pay attention to it, that is a success. With STOQ, we set it up, and we don't really have to think about it."

K Place also highlighted STOQ's support team, particularly its responsiveness and ability to pick up an issue without making the team repeat its history.

"The support team is fantastic! Very responsive and willing to work through problems. Every time I talk to someone new on an issue, they're already filled in."

The results

In 90 days, K Place's back-in-stock campaign generated:

For K Place, the problem started with something simple: customers were being told a product was back in stock when it wasn't actually available online.

With STOQ handling the location-level back-in-stock logic, K Place could send those high-intent customers a more accurate notification and let its existing Klaviyo setup handle the email.

And, as Kevin puts it:

"If something is just working and you don't have to pay attention to it, that is a success."