Notes from the shop floor and the writing desk

No. Shopify B2B gives a company contact exactly two permission levels, Ordering only and Location admin, and neither one can approve or edit an order a colleague placed. Here's what the Submit for approval button actually does, and the workarounds merchants use.

The honest answer to a question merchants have asked since 2022: once a B2B buyer submits a draft order for review, can they edit it themselves. Plus what Shopify's now-free B2B tools solve and what they still don't.

No, Shopify has no built-in restock notification. Here is exactly what you can build for free with Flow and Shopify Email, where it dead-ends, and what the popular forum recipe gets wrong.

Why a product-level notify-me trains customers to ignore you, how variant-level back in stock alerts work on Shopify, and a five-minute test to check which one you actually have.

Restock alerts fail quietly, and you usually find out from a sales dip, not an error message. Here is a ten-minute self-test any merchant can run on any app to prove alerts actually fire and land before you rely on them.

Four real back in stock email templates for Shopify, from a basic restock alert to a win-back for something long out of stock, plus what makes a restock subject line actually get opened

A plain comparison of SMS and email restock alerts on Shopify: real open and conversion numbers, actual per-message SMS costs, opt-in law, and when each channel makes sense.

Three real routes for adding a notify-me button when a variant sells out: theme code, Shopify's native workarounds, and a purpose-built app block, plus what to check before you trust any of them.

Stocky's shutdown timeline, what breaks and when, the supplier data you need to export now, and an honest roundup of native, budget, and enterprise alternatives for small Shopify stores.

How demand decays after a restock, why batch pacing and send speed both matter, and how to audit your back in stock app's actual send latency, timestamp by timestamp.

A line-by-line pricing teardown of Swym, Appikon, Amp, STOQ, Notify!, and Kbite, plus what per-subscriber vs. per-send metering means for your actual monthly bill as your list grows.

The four reasons back in stock alerts go missing or don't help: bad webhooks, burst sends, no audit trail, and Markets mismatches. How to check your own app.

A practical walkthrough for moving a back in stock waitlist between Shopify apps: exporting your data, matching CSV columns, verifying the import, and timing the cutover around a restock.

Amazon takes the whole printing cost out of your share of a paperback or hardcover, not off the top. That turns a 60% rate into about 23% to 27% of the list price. Here is Amazon's own formula, its own printing cost tables, and the arithmetic worked through so you can check your own report.

Amazon subtracts a delivery cost from every 70% sale, priced by the megabyte, and at about 10 MB the 70% option stops beating the 35% option. Kobo, Apple, Google Play and Draft2Digital publish no per-megabyte deduction at all. Here is what each store publishes, quoted from its own pages.

A pre-order campaign can make your launch month look wrong on every store, in a different direction each time. Amazon can push the sale into the month before. Google dates it two ways in two reports. Apple records the fulfilment. Kobo and Draft2Digital never say. Here is what each store publishes, quoted from its own pages.

Amazon, Apple Books and Kobo all convert your royalties into your bank currency before they pay you. Only one of them publishes where the rate comes from and when it is struck. Here is what each store says, quoted from their own help pages.