Every empty product page is a fork: the shopper either leaves, or tells you they’ll wait. This post closes our data series with the widest lens — what a full year of waiting shoppers added up to across 20,600+ stores, and what the shape of that year says about planning the next one.
1. The Scale
Insights
- $229 million in merchant sales came through back-in-stock alerts and preorders in the twelve months ending June 2026, up 62% year over year.
- Back in stock contributed $165.7M (+72% YoY) from 15.2 million requests and 963,000 converted requests (+39% YoY).
- Preorder added $63.6M (+41% YoY) across 569,000 orders.
- All-time: The two features have now recovered over $528 million in demand that started out as an out-of-stock page.
What this means. Back in stock and preorder have quietly become a revenue line, not a widget. If your store isn’t measuring recovered demand as its own channel — with its own conversion rate and its own targets — you’re managing a growing income stream blind.
2. The Shape of the Year
Monthly attributed sales, July 2024 – June 2026. Notify Me! platform data, USD.
Insights
- Q4 surges first: November is the biggest request month of the year (1.39M requests), and October 2025 was the record preorder month at $7.5M as stores pre-sold holiday inventory.
- Spring sets records: March 2026 was the largest back-in-stock month ever measured at $16.3M.
- Growth is step-like: Each quarter’s baseline now sits above the last — this is compounding adoption, not just seasonality.
What this means. Prepare for Q4 in September: build your waitlist capture and preorder listings before the traffic arrives, because holiday sell-outs are where restock demand spikes hardest. Then do it again in early spring — the data says the second peak is real.
The bottom line. A year of data leaves one conclusion standing: out of stock is a timing problem, not a lost sale, as long as you capture the intent. The stores winning this channel do three things relentlessly: they let every empty page collect demand, they restock against the queue, and they alert the moment inventory lands. Everything else in this series is detail.
