Product recall management for Shopify stores

When a supplier notifies you that a batch is compromised, three things have to happen quickly and in the right order. Remaining stock has to stop moving. Everyone who already received units from that batch has to be contacted. And you need a defensible written record of both, because the regulator asking questions afterwards will want evidence, not recollection.

The bottleneck is almost always the second step. Without batch-level records, "which customers got this lot" is unanswerable, so brands over-notify — recalling far more product than was ever at risk, at enormous cost to both margin and trust.

A recall in LotTrack is a case opened against a specific lot, with a reason recorded. Opening it marks the lot as recalled so remaining units are excluded from any further allocation, and the recall cascades through the lot family — if that batch was split across locations or partially held for QC, every fragment is caught, not just the row you clicked.

The case then assembles the downstream picture from the order-to-lot links already recorded at fulfillment time.

From an open case you can send a recall notice to exactly the customers who received the affected batch. The subject and body come from a template you set in advance, with placeholders for the order and product details, so the message is ready before the day you need it.

Sending is always a deliberate action — LotTrack never emails your customers automatically. You review the recipient list, you review the message, and you send.

Two details matter more than they first appear. A recall notice invites replies, so you set a reply-to address that a human actually monitors rather than letting responses vanish into an unattended transactional mailbox. And the sender name is yours, so a message about a safety issue arrives looking like it came from the brand the customer bought from.

Every send is logged per recipient, which is what turns "we notified affected customers" into a claim you can evidence.

Not every suspicion becomes a recall. When a batch is questionable but unconfirmed, you can put it on QC hold or quarantine it instead, which pulls it out of fulfillment while you investigate without triggering customer contact.

Holds can be partial. If only part of a batch is affected, splitting the lot lets you quarantine the affected quantity while the rest keeps shipping — and the split keeps its lineage, so if the situation escalates to a full recall nothing is lost track of.

Every lot carries an immutable event log: created or imported, status changed, fulfilled, split, recalled, returned, resolved. Nothing is edited in place; each change appends an event with its timestamp.

A recall case exports to CSV covering the affected lot, the orders, the customers, the notification log, and the event history — the format an auditor, a regulator, or an insurer will ask for.