Wholesale Handler
A calendar season has a return date, where stock does not
A back-in-stock alert can only promise something conditional - an email if and when the product returns. A season is different. The window is a start day and an end day that repeat every year, so the next opening is a computable date, and the catalogue can show it long before it arrives.
In Wholesale Handler an out-of-season product sits in its own section of the order form, headed by the day it comes back - Back on 13 April (in 6 days) - with the recurring window beneath it as In season 13 April to 30 June. No email is needed for a buyer to learn that. It is standing information, there whenever they open the order form. Managing seasonal availability for wholesale produce covers setting those windows in the first place.
Letting the buyer ask to be told
Every out-of-season product carries a Notify me button. A buyer presses it, the button becomes Notified, and on the morning the season opens they get one email naming the product and the supplier. The subscription is then cleared, so an opening produces a single email and not a drip.
The same button appears on sold-out products as a separate subscription, so a buyer can wait on a restock and on a season independently.
Letting the buyer choose beats keeping a list of who to email. Back-in-stock alerts converted at 6.72% in Omnisend's 2025 benchmark data, the highest of any automated email type across a set of 27,000 brands, because a buyer who asked to be told has already declared the intent. The same data found only 0.6% of brands sending one at all.
The weekly digest covers the whole catalogue
Per-product alerts are the wrong shape for a buyer watching forty lines. For that there is one email each Monday listing what is coming into season and what is going out, for a single supplier.
The horizon is the next seven days. If nothing moves that week it widens to a month, so a quiet week still shows what is coming rather than a blank. Only an empty month produces a "no changes" email, which is what stops a weekly send from training people to ignore it.
The digest is off until a customer turns it on, and it is set per supplier - a buyer can take the seasonal email from the grower whose crop plan they care about and not from the other three.
A season opening is not unmixed good news. Selling a seasonal glut through wholesale accounts covers the crop that arrives faster than the accounts can absorb it.
Choosing between the alert and the digest
Neither of them places an order. A buyer who takes the same list every week wants the order itself to recur, which is a different mechanism - what a standing order is in wholesale covers that one.
Two to three weeks is the notice buyers plan against
NC State Extension's guidance for growers selling to distributors is to communicate upcoming availability at least two to three weeks before harvest, because a buyer making this week's ordering decisions is also looking two to three weeks ahead. It tells growers to put that extended availability on the weekly availability list itself - the fresh sheet.
The weekly digest does not reach that far on a busy week: its near horizon is seven days. The three-week view comes from the catalogue instead, where the return date sits against the product permanently. The digest is the nudge; the order form is the forecast.
Availability email is commercial email, and business-to-business is not exempt
The FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guide states that the law makes no exception for business-to-business email, so a seasonal update to trade buyers sits under the same rules as a consumer newsletter. Opt-out requests must be honoured within 10 business days, the opt-out mechanism must keep working for at least 30 days after the message goes out, and the recipient cannot be asked to pay, to give anything beyond their email address, or to take any step past visiting a single web page. The FTC puts the maximum at $53,088 per violating email.
The unsubscribe link in Wholesale Handler's weekly digest is a signed link that opens one page and needs no sign-in, with a confirming click on that page so a mail client prefetching the link cannot unsubscribe anyone by accident. A per-product alert has nothing to unsubscribe from once it has sent, and before it sends the same button cancels it.
What these alerts do not cover
- A dated unavailability window lapsing sends nothing. Marking a product unavailable until 20 May for a weather delay puts it back on sale on the 21st silently. Only stock returning and seasons opening trigger an email.
- Customers whose accounts the supplier manages get neither email. Both are addressed to the customer's own sign-in address, so a contact the supplier maintains on their behalf is skipped. The return date on the order form is what reaches them.
- The waiting list is visible for stock only. The restock screen names the businesses waiting on a sold-out product. There is no equivalent view of who is waiting on a season.
- The season sweep runs once a day at 03:00 UTC. An alert lands within about a day of a US supplier's local midnight, not to the minute.
