Mark it low before you mark it out

Ask most Philippine distributors how they track stock in the catalogue and the honest answer is two states: there is stock, or there is not. Everything is fine until, without warning, it is not fine at all. A product sits marked "in stock" right up to the order that clears the last of it out of the bodega, and the next five buyers who try to order it (a sari-sari store, a canteen, two mini marts) hit a wall nobody saw coming.

There is a state in between that most catalogues never use. Low stock. It is a small thing to add, and it changes the shape of the whole problem.

Two states is not enough

In stock and out of stock describe what already happened. They tell a buyer nothing about what is about to happen, which is the information that would actually change their order.

A buyer who sees "in stock" assumes the usual quantity is there and orders as normal: six cases, a sako, whatever they always take. A buyer who sees "out of stock" has already lost the sale for that item. Neither of those is the moment you wanted to influence. The moment you wanted to influence was the week before, while there was still something to work with.

That middle state is where a shortage is still cheap to manage. Once you are out, every option left is a bad one: apologise, split the delivery across two runs, or lose the order to whichever distributor your buyer calls next.

What the low flag actually buys you

Marking a product low, rather than waiting to mark it out, does three things that a plain in-stock or out-of-stock flag cannot.

It spreads the remaining stock out instead of letting it go to whoever orders first. A buyer who sees a low-stock pill next to an item tends to order what they need rather than padding the order "just in case". Padding is exactly the behaviour that empties a bodega faster than it should, and it gets worse once word goes round the route.

It gives you time to reorder before the gap opens. A product marked out is a decision that already happened. A product marked low is a warning while you still have days, not hours, to place a supplier order. Days matter, because a delivery stuck behind truck ban hours, or a shipment waiting on a boat, does not care how urgent your order is.

It moves the awkward conversation earlier, where it is smaller. Telling a buyer a product is running low, before they have committed to an order built around it, is a much easier message than telling them on collection day that half of what they ordered never made it onto the van.

None of this requires predicting demand precisely. It only requires noticing early and saying so.

When to flip it, ber months included

There is no universal number, because a fast mover and a slow mover behave differently at the same remaining quantity. The rule of thumb that holds up across most catalogues is simpler than a formula: if what is left would not comfortably cover the orders you would normally expect before your next restock, it is low now, not later.

For a product you reorder weekly, that means flipping it days before the shelf is actually bare, not the morning after. For something you only reorder occasionally, the buffer needs to be longer, because the lead time to fix it is longer too.

Season moves the answer more than most distributors allow for. Through the ber months, fiesta week on your route, and the run-up to Undas, the same remaining quantity is a much shorter runway than it would be in a quiet month. Habagat weather cuts the other way: a road closed for two days, or a boat that does not sail, turns a comfortable buffer into a shortage. Set the flag early enough that the room it buys you is real.

Do not let it sit stale

A low-stock flag left up after the stock comes back is its own kind of problem. Buyers who see "low" on something that has actually been fully restocked start ignoring the flag altogether, and then it has stopped doing its job for every product, not just that one.

The same discipline that keeps a price list trustworthy applies here. A status only works if it is current. Flip it back the moment the stock is actually healthy again, the same way you would flip it low the moment it is not.

Where goodport fits

In goodport, every product carries one of three stock states: in stock, low, or out. You set it from the product list in a couple of taps, and it shows up immediately as a pill on the item in your buyer's own portal, right where they are building their order.

That is the whole mechanism. There is no inventory count to reconcile and no integration to maintain. It is a flag you control, seen by the people whose ordering behaviour it is meant to change, at the exact moment their order is being built rather than after the van has already gone out with a gap in it.

If your bodega has a habit of running dry with no warning to your buyers, book a demo and we will look at how the low-stock flag would sit on your own catalogue.