How to Email Your Team Before a Shopify Product Expires

You can't reorder stock the day something expires. The people who manage procurement, warehouse, and compliance need lead time — weeks of it, sometimes. This guide shows how to get automatic email alerts to the right people before any product's expiry date hits.

The lead time problem

A buyer for a supplement brand has 300 SKUs with rolling expiry dates. Each one needs a reorder decision made 4–6 weeks before the current stock runs out or expires. Manually tracking those dates in a spreadsheet works until someone goes on leave, or the spreadsheet falls out of sync, or a date just slips through.

DateCue watches the expiry metafield on every product and sends an email to whatever staff address you configure — automatically, at whatever lead time you set. No spreadsheet required.

Setting up the workflow

This workflow requires you to have an expiry date metafield on your products. If you haven't set that up yet, see the guide on auto-hiding products on expiry — it walks through the metafield setup.

The Include tags filter targets only products tagged "perishable" (or whatever tag you use to mark products that need expiry management). If you want every product with the metafield to trigger an alert, leave the filter empty.

Two alerts are better than one

A 30-day alert is useful for procurement. A 7-day alert is useful for operations — "this product is about to come off sale, make sure you're ready." They're two separate DateCue workflows on the same metafield, just with different timing offsets and potentially different recipient email addresses.

Who gets the email?

You configure the recipient email address when setting up the workflow in DateCue. It doesn't have to be the store owner — set it to your buyer, your warehouse manager, your compliance officer, whoever needs to know. Each workflow can have a different recipient, so your 30-day procurement alert goes to the buyer and your 7-day operational alert goes to the warehouse team.