The out of stock problem
Displaying OOS (out of stock) or even discontinued products on an ecommerce website can be challenging. On the one hand you don’t want to take down valuable traffic driving content just because of transient stocking or create a lot of maintenance, but you don’t want to disappoint users & disrupt the shopping experience either, and risk losing sales.
Ofcourse you can just set your platform to not display any product if its unavailable, and avoid opening the whole can of worms. But as we know there’s never just one way to do anything in ecommerce, and opinion amongst merchandising and trading teams isn’t cut & dried either on what exactly to do, where, and when a product goes low or becomes unavailable.
So while the rest of your business is arguing over what to do, here’s some perspectives and methods that have worked and tested well for many different retailers, and have helped them optimize the user experience and keep shopper momentum going when products drop in and out of availability.
2 Main Issues
Lets start unpicking this by summarising the 2 main issues at stake.
(In the interest of TLDR, I’ve broken rest of this piece into 2 further articles, so you can read it all the way through or pick one if that’s more on your mind)
Display (Y/N)?
First up, is whether or not to display OOS products on your product list and search engine results pages in the first place. There’s no right or wrong answer to this, but there are opportunities and risks in doing either. (click here to read more on managing your PLP’s and SRP’s)
How to optimise them
Second, is what to do to optimise an out of stock PDP (product detail page) when they do inevitably get hit. Because they will get traffic! So you have to have a strategy to engage the shopper, keep momentum in the journey and avert potentially lost sales. (click here to read more on improving the experience on the product detail page)
