Quickstart — Your first week with BulkFlow

Welcome. This guide walks through the four things you should do in your first week. After this, you'll have BulkFlow running quietly in the background, deducting bulk stock as orders come in, and alerting you before anything runs out.

Day 1 — Finish onboarding

You should have landed in BulkFlow's onboarding wizard right after install. If you skipped it, head to Settings → Account → Re-run wizard to resume (admin only).

The wizard does three things:

1. Scans your Shopify catalog for products that look like they share bulk inventory (50-packs, 250-packs, 500-packs of the same base item, for example)
2. Suggests bulk pools — one shared inventory pool per "family" of pack sizes
3. Locks in your starting numbers — how many individual units do you have today, before any deductions

After onboarding, your Dashboard shows the new bulk pools, and you can add more products anytime from Add from Shopify in the sidebar.

Day 2 — Verify webhooks are firing

Open Settings → Connection and find the webhook health panel. BulkFlow registers 16 webhook topics covering orders, refunds, order edits, product changes, inventory levels, fulfillment orders, locations, billing and uninstall. Every expected topic should show a green badge. (The three privacy/compliance topics — customers/data_request, customers/redact, shop/redact — are managed separately through the app configuration and don't appear as regular registrations.)

If any topic shows MISSING (red), click Re-register all webhooks. This is the most common day-2 issue — usually a transient Shopify hiccup during install.

Day 3 — Place a real test order

The cleanest way to confirm everything works: place a real order yourself on the storefront for a multi-pack product.

1. Buy a single 50-pack from your Shopify store
2. Mark it Paid (if you're using bogus payment in a dev store, this happens automatically)
3. Open BulkFlow → Activity (sidebar)
4. You should see a sale row deducting 50 units from that product's bulk pool, tagged with the order number

If you DON'T see it, check the Orders page for failed lines, or contact support@bulkflow.app with the order number.

Day 4–5 — Tune your alerts

Open Settings → Email. Set:

• Email Alerts — ON plus at least one recipient (comma-separated). You get an email when any managed bulk pool drops below its threshold, at most one per item per cooldown window. Alerts can't send until a recipient is added — the status badge tells you if that's the case.
• Catalog discovery digest (optional) — a weekly (or daily) email listing new Shopify products you're not yet tracking in BulkFlow, so new listings don't silently drift outside your pools. This is a discovery email — the separate Install Health digest covers what BulkFlow is doing on your behalf.

Per-item low-stock thresholds live on each item's detail page. Start tight, loosen later once you understand your burn rate.

Day 6–7 — Set up your weekly checks

Two different safety nets, two different pages:

• Shopify Health (sidebar) — compares what BulkFlow thinks Shopify shows vs. what Shopify actually shows, per variant, and flags drift and binding problems. This is your "BulkFlow vs Shopify" check.
• Reconciliation (sidebar) — compares BulkFlow's pools against physical counts you record. Feed it with Scan & Count (barcode scanning) or the Stock Count Upload page (spreadsheet counts) — both are audit-logged. This is your "BulkFlow vs the shelf" check.

Set a recurring weekly calendar reminder for both. 10 minutes a week saves you from inventory disasters.

What's next

• Multi-location merchants: Read Multi-location warehouses — required reading if you have more than one Shopify location.
• Pro+ merchants: Read Reverse-create products for the in-app product builder.
• Questions: support@bulkflow.app or the Command Center button in the sidebar. See Getting help for every support channel.