- Shopify stores with 50+ SKUs
- Retail with shared Shopify + Xero stock
- Wholesale + warehouse ops
- Multi-channel sellers (Shopify + Amazon AU + eBay)
AI Inventory Watch is a nightly automated agent that reads your Shopify or Xero inventory, flags stockouts, low-movers and pricing anomalies, and pings your team before 7am AEST. It runs on Claude Code, costs $497 AUD to set up and $99 AUD/month to run, and is live in your Slack inside a working week.
What you actually get
You wake up. The agent has already done its job. In your Slack or inbox is a short, readable digest that says:
- These SKUs are at zero stock. These are below 10 units. These were dropping fast last week.
- These three products have no image on the live store. This one has the wrong price compared to your supplier sheet.
- These four products haven’t sold a unit in 90 days. Worth reviewing.
That’s it. No dashboard you need to remember to open. No 47-page Shopify export. No standup where someone says “we’ve been out of the night cream since Sunday.”
Why we built this as a productised service
We built the first version of this for an Australian Shopify skincare brand that also distributes through major national retail. The team was catching overnight stockouts hours late, at the 9am standup, instead of the moment the inventory data was actually fresh. By the time anyone noticed, ads had been running against zero stock for half a day.
We wired up a Claude Code agent to run at 23:00 AEST every night. It reads inventory through the Shopify Admin API, cross-checks against the Xero record, looks for image gaps, and posts the findings to Slack. Total runtime: about 90 seconds. Total API cost: roughly $5 AUD a month.
After three months of running it for that client and a couple of other e-commerce brands, we realised the only differences between deploys were the catalogue, the alert channel, and how the team wanted the digest formatted. Everything else was the same. That’s a productised service.
What’s actually in the $99 AUD/month
The monthly fee covers four things that you’d otherwise have to wire up yourself:
- Hosting, a slice of a Hetzner VPS we already operate. Uptime is our problem, not yours.
- API costs, Claude API usage. A typical 200-SKU audit costs about $0.20 in API spend; the bulk of $99 is hosting + margin, not API. We absorb spikes.
- Monitoring, if the agent fails for any reason (Shopify outage, expired token, prompt regression), we get paged and you don’t.
- Tweaks, small prompt or routing changes during the month are bundled. “Add a check for unfulfilled orders older than 48 hours”, that’s bundled. “Build a second agent that does X”, that’s a separate scope.
How the build week actually runs
| Day | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 | 45-minute kick-off call. You share read-only Shopify + Xero access. We confirm alert routing (Slack, email, or both). |
| 2–3 | We build the agent against your real catalogue. First dry runs land in a private Slack thread for your eyes only. |
| 4 | You review the first audit. We tune false positives, add or remove checks. |
| 5 | Agent goes live into your team’s actual channel. Hosted on our infrastructure, running nightly. |
| Week 2–4 | We watch it run. We tune anything that’s noisy. By the end of the month it’s stable. |
Best for
The productised package is right for you if you tick at least three of these:
- You have 50+ active SKUs.
- You run Shopify, Xero, WooCommerce, or a queryable stock system.
- You’ve had at least one painful late-caught stockout in the last six months.
- You spend on ads (Meta, Google, TikTok), the cost of running ads to out-of-stock products is the most expensive form of being asleep at the wheel.
- You have a Slack channel or shared inbox where alerts won’t get lost.
If your SKU count is under 30 or your stock data lives in a spreadsheet, the productised package is overkill, we’d point you at a Quick Start build for $497 instead.
What about agentic AI more broadly?
This is one of the cleanest possible introductions to an agentic loop running in production: a small, well-scoped read-only agent with a single job, predictable inputs, and a hard cutoff for cost. We deliberately don’t let it take actions on your store in v1, Claude flags, a human decides. After a few months of clean read-only behaviour, write permissions for things like “unpublish out-of-stock products” become a sensible upgrade.
What you own
When you cancel (or we part ways), you keep:
- All the prompts.
- The cron config + the agent code.
- Documentation showing what the agent does, when, and how to run it on your own infrastructure.
There is no vendor lock-in. If you ever want to take it in-house, we’ll spend 30 minutes showing your developer or VA how to run it on a $10/month server.
Pricing in plain English
- $497 AUD setup, one-off, kick-off, build, tuning, go-live.
- $99 AUD/month, ongoing, hosting, API costs, monitoring, bundled tweaks. Cancel any time.
GST is added at invoicing. No lock-in contract. First month’s run is included in the setup fee, so you’re not paying twice in week one.