At times, even the most proficient and experienced retailers unfortunately sell out of popular products. How such inventory shortages are conveyed through an ecommerce platform may impact search engine optimization, shopper experience, and sales.
Even though not all the people visiting a product page is ready to convert into a customer, out-of-stock inventory tend to disappoint the actual buyers who are planning on making a purchase.
Suppose a shopper is looking for products you see. He/she enters a particular query on Google, notices the listing for the ecommerce website on the search engine page, and click through. He/she is ready to buy, but, you cannot unfortunately sell.
This could be annoying if the product page did not communicate the outage immediately. Maybe the shopper chose a color, size, or quantity. And after that he/she saw that your shelf is empty. He/she leaves the website. Google identifies the bounce and would not send any shopper back to you.
What follows are a few tips for handling with such a situation – temporarily out-of-stock products.
1. Keep the Page Up
The experts providing inventory RFID system ask the retailers to not take the page down. If new inventory is on the way, the page must stay live. 404 errors will pave the way for the worst experience. Moreover, soon the search engine bot will remove the page from index if it has been down for a prolonged period. When the inventory is sitting in the warehouse, there may not be multiple customers left to purchase it.
2. Explain Why the Product is Out of Stock
Some products may not be available throughout the year. The supply for other products such as commodities may be limited. Give a definite notice on the product page explaining why a product is currently out of stock. For instance, the retailers may write, ‘This product is available only from August to March’ or ‘Due to unanticipated demand, we are out of stock temporarily’
3. Incorporate Estimated Dates
In case you have a clear ideal of when a product will be available, please let the customers know. Do incorporate an estimated date. If your ecommerce website enables it, you can accept backorders. If the customers are not in haste, they can make the purchase late, knowing it will ship right when it is back in the stock.
4. Display Inventory Quantities by Color and Size
According to the professionals providing optimal RFID inventory management system, for the products with variations such as color or size, please show the availability right away. For instance, showing all the sizes simultaneously may be quite better than showing the drop down menus of different sizes.
5. Send Out Text or Email Notifications
Give the shoppers a means to register for text or email notifications so that they know when the product becomes available. Combined with estimated dates, the notifications could actually save the sale. A shopper with utmost patience will agree to wait for the product to stock, instead of heading to competitors.
6. Offer Replacement or Related Products
It is an excellent idea to have some product recommendations on the product page. Take this same feature into account when the product is out of stock. Point the shoppers to replacement or similar products. You may say that the 22-soda can capacity cooler is out of stock but we have the 30 soda can size readily available.
Besides the tips stated above, moving the out-of-stock inventory to the end of the product page and the search result pages also help. Moving the items below the list puts only the readily available items first, and this leads to few disappointed shoppers. That is amazing, right?
