What is the low stock threshold in WooCommerce?

The low stock threshold is the stock quantity at or below which WooCommerce treats a product as running low.

How WooCommerce uses it

There are two places to set it:

• Store-wide: WooCommerce › Settings › Products › Inventory has a Low stock threshold, alongside the Out of stock threshold and the option to enable low stock notifications.
• Per product: each product's Inventory tab has its own low stock threshold, which overrides the store-wide one for that product. Stock management is set per product or per variation.

When a product's stock falls to its threshold, WooCommerce can email a low-stock notice to the admin, if notifications are on. The product also shows under the Low stock filter in Analytics › Stock.

A worked example

Say your store-wide threshold is 5. A slow-selling print with 5 left is fine for weeks. A fast-selling tote that sells 4 a day would be gone the next day, too late to reorder. Setting the tote's own threshold to 60 gives you warning in time.

Why it matters

A single store-wide number treats every product the same, whatever its sales rate or supplier. A better habit is to set each product's threshold to its reorder point: average daily sales × lead time + safety stock. Then the low-stock email means "order now". Askshelf's stock-runway lookup looks at it from the other side, listing products that will run out within a number of days based on how fast they're selling. The guide on getting a low-stock report in WooCommerce covers the setup, and setting reorder points shows how to pick each number.