Running out of stock and having products unavailable is never fun, and many times, customers will either go to another shop for the same thing, go to different sales channels, or not buy it. Some will look for similar products that are similar to the other models if they want it so badly from your shop.
The goal of this is to sell, but here, we’ll tell you how to deal with the product not being available without hurting sales.
First, find out how much you’re losing. You should see how much you’re losing and what will happen if it’s not in stock. You also can implement the reports system to find out how many chances to sell you’re missing out on, and also look at the price, and conversion rate, and look at what you won’t earn. At the same instance, find out how many visitors visited a product that wasn’t’ available, and whether they chose a different product, getting an Availability alert, or leaving without purchasing.
One way to do it is show the temporary unavailability. This is a good one if people aren’t really pressed for time. They can count down, and from there, if you offer a discount for a long wait time, it might give them a better reason to stick around and buy from you.
There is also seasonal categories and products. This is a big category, and you’ll want to also look at these conversions, and removing this once a year would be a mistake. Changing the product pages into hubs of information does make sense, and allows you to build the visibility in these categories to search results, and in order to swap the content of a page to another when the right time happens, it won’t hurt the structure. For seasonal products, you can make sure they’re available at the same time every year. Removing or hiding these with 404 or redirect pages might be the best solution.
For products discontinued, you should forward them, but not with a 301 direction, to similar products to finalize this. A product that’s unavailable shouldn’t be a blind alley on the way to purchase, but instead, direct them to traffic that does exist. You shouldn’t remove product subpages or redirect with a 301 redirection, but instead, put a similar product of the one that’s not available in a clear enough way that customers will add this. This, in turn, will also improve conversions from products that are discontinued.
The strategy will be used to generate the traffic from products that haven’t been offered because of the aggressive distribution policy. The competition is usually small in this, and it translates to big traffic with low SEO. Handling product unavailability is important, and you should make sure that you do this in a way that’s fitting not just for you, but for the business as well, and in turn create a better, more rewarding situation.
