Stock Availability Inquiry on Products

Posted by:
ajencyin

Published on:
April 30, 2021

Discovering an item is ‘out of stock’ remains one of the biggest frustrations for online shoppers. Even the most-prepared retailers can sometimes sell out of popular items. How these inventory shortages are communicated on an ecommerce website may impact shopper experience, search engine optimization, and sales. Although not every visitor to a product detail page is ready to convert, an out-of-stock item can disappoint real buyers who are ready to make a purchase.

Even for the most successful online brands, only a small fraction of people who visit their website actually make a purchase. And if you hide out of stock products on Shopify, you are lowering that conversion rate even further. Especially since your best sellers will tend to go out stock first, and most often. Usually Shopify gives you option to hide or push down the out of stock products. If you are still hiding out of stock products, you are missing out in so many ways — the potential sale, the data that a customer wanted of that specific product, and the customer’s happiness with your brand. Here’s what you should do instead to increase revenue, get insight into what your customers actually want, and make them happy.

Improve Customer Experience When Products are Out Of Stock

There are ways to effectively use out of stock email messages to encourage people to come back to your store, make a purchase and possibly even spend more in the second go-around. To achieve this, we have built a custom functionality and styled it to match with the theme for one of our Shopify stores. When a product goes out of stock instead of hiding it, we can indicate that it is out of stock showing ‘Inquiry Availability‘ next to it. On click of ‘Inquiry Availability’ it opens into a popup where user can enter a message regarding the product availability and send. You can then respond to these messages notifying them about the product availability. Reaching out with back-in-stock emails is a great customer care and avenue to generate more sales.

Stock-outs are not always avoidable. However, poorly communicated stock levels cannot only damage revenue, but can also impact long-term relationships with customers, and even reduce brand loyalty. Let customers know if the item is discontinued. Do not leave your customers waiting to get an email notification about something coming back in stock when you know it’s never happening. This falls in line with our intention of being trustworthy and honest with your customers.

It is a good idea to have a couple of similar products on your product detail page. Consider this same feature when a product is out of stock. Point the shopper to similar or replacement items. Make sure you recommend products that they might want instead. This gives you a chance to avoid the loss of sale and keep your customers happy.