Generate New Leads With Out Of Stock Items

Running out of stock is frustrating. For store owners, it feels like lost revenue. For customers, it’s a dead end.

I do hate seeing pages of products that I can’t buy, it’s like someone eating a carrot cake in front of you when you’re on a diet.

But here’s the thing, an out-of-stock product page isn’t necessarily the end of the story. Handled well, it can be the start of a conversation, and that conversation, properly set up, can turn a visitor who couldn’t buy today into a paying customer tomorrow.

A lot of eCommerce stores aren’t doing this. They’re either hiding out-of-stock products entirely, or leaving a bare product page with no way to capture the interest of visitors who arrived ready to buy. Both are missed opportunities.

The Visitor Who Couldn’t Buy Is Still A Lead

Think about what it means when someone lands on an out-of-stock product page. They didn’t stumble there by accident. They searched for the product, clicked through from a campaign, or followed a link because they wanted that specific item. That’s purchase intent, one of the most valuable signals in eCommerce.

The average eCommerce conversion rate in 2025 sits at around 2–5.2%. Most visitors don’t buy on any given visit. But a visitor on an out-of-stock product page has already cleared several of the hurdles that stop most visitors converting. They know what they want, they’ve found your store, and they’re ready to spend. The only thing standing between them and a purchase is availability.

That gap, between clear intent and the ability to fulfil it, is exactly where a smart business can intervene.

Back-In-Stock Notifications – Simple, Underused & Highly Effective

The most straightforward way to capture that intent is a back-in-stock notification. In place of the Add to Basket button, the customer is invited to leave their email address to be notified the moment the product returns to stock.

For example, on Black Friday I was searching Google for a ‘Lego Train Set’ and came across a Google Paid Shopping advert that showed photos of products and a price from various sellers.

After seeing John Lewis promoting the train set that retails at over £100 for only £60, I immediately clicked on the advert. To my disappointment, the product was actually out of stock.

But what they did have was a clear CTA to say email when available – which I signed up for.

This I thought was helpful, whilst also a sneaky way to generate new leads. Further to that remarketing banners would no doubt stalk me thereafter, and John Lewis has my email to begin sending me other products they want to promote.

The data on how well this works is striking. Back-in-stock emails achieve open rates of 65%, click rates of 24%, and a 5-15% increase in revenue. These figures dwarf typical promotional email performance. These aren’t cold emails sent to a disengaged list, they’re going to people who have already demonstrated they want the product. The warm-up has already happened.

The mechanic is simple. The customer subscribes, the product comes back into stock, an automated email goes out, and the customer returns to a live product page ready to buy. When set up properly, the entire loop runs without manual intervention.

One important caveat is that this only works if the notification goes out promptly when stock is restored, and if it lands the customer back on a live, purchasable product page. A restock email that arrives three days late, or that takes the customer to a page that’s already sold out again, will erode the trust you built by asking for their email in the first place.

You’re Also Building Your Email List

There’s a secondary benefit that’s easy to overlook is that every customer who subscribes to a back-in-stock notification is opting into direct communication with your store.

That’s a genuinely warm contact with someone who knows your brand, wanted one of your products, and has actively asked to hear from you. Depending on how your email marketing is set up, this can feed directly into your broader retention strategy, with welcome sequences, product recommendations, promotional campaigns.

The ability to capture and retain warm leads through channels you own, rather than paying repeatedly to re-acquire them through paid media, is really valuable.

The key is to being transparent. Customers should know what they’re signing up for, and you should have a clear sense of how you’ll use their information beyond the restock notification.

Using Out-Of-Stock Pages to Understand Demand

Here’s an angle that doesn’t get talked about enough. Out-of-stock notification data is a direct read on product demand.

If ten people sign up to be notified about the same product, that’s a clear signal. If fifty do, that’s an urgent one! Either you need to restock quickly or reconsider how you’re managing inventory for that product. The waitlist is effectively a demand gauge that updates in real time, with zero survey cost.

Some stores have used this insight to validate new product lines before committing to inventory. Running a ‘coming soon’ or pre-order page for a new product, with a notification or pre-order capture gives you a concrete read on appetite before you’ve spent anything on stock.

If interest is low, you’ve saved yourself from a costly mistake. If it’s high, you have a ready-made list of buyers to notify on launch day.

The Paid Advertising Angle

There’s one more opportunity worth flagging, particularly for stores running paid search or social campaigns. Out-of-stock pages can burn significant ad spend if they’re not managed properly.

If a paid campaign is sending traffic to a product that’s out of stock, every click is money spent on a visitor who can’t convert. The back-in-stock notification partially recovers this, because at least you’re capturing the lead rather than losing them entirely, but ideally, campaigns should be paused or redirected when a product goes out of stock, and reactivated once stock is live.

This requires clear communication between whoever manages your inventory and whoever runs your paid campaigns. It sounds obvious, but it’s a gap that quietly costs stores significant amount of money. Making it a standing process, a simple notification when a product hits zero stock, avoids the issue entirely.

I’ve genuinely lost count of the number of times I’ve clicked through from an ad on Instagram to find the item is out of stock. I cringe to think of the money they are losing this way.

Hiding Out Of Stock Items Discussion

There are arguments for both displaying and hiding out-of-stock items. Sometimes users don’t want to see out-of-stock items, and there are other times when they may want to.

For example, if you’d been searching for a specific product like a TV, and it wasn’t displayed on John Lewis’s website, you would shop somewhere else. However, if it was listed as temporarily out of stock, you might wait for it to return, as you know they price match and you’d get a 5 year warranty included.

Getting your brand benefits and why someone should buy from you in your product page copy is critical.

So implementing a tactic for capturing emails is a great way of capturing interest in a product, and potentially checking whether there is enough demand to get an item back in stock.

At the same time, users may not want to trawl through loads of out-of-stock items on your product listing pages. This can damage user experience and how they think about your business “they haven’t got much in stock”.

Placing a simple filter on the results pages can remedy this. John Lewis does provide this option (see below).

Whether you chose to hide or show by default is an important discussion to have. I’d lean towards a solution that hides them by default or provides a dedicated section at the base of the page ‘items back in stock soon’. So if you were looking for that TV or train set and you were on the main products page, you’d be able to see it.

Another option is to send out-of-stock items to the end of your product listing pages, so they don’t interfere with users browsing.

Either way, if the product is only temporarily out-of-stock, keep the page crawlable and indexable by search engines. DOn’t just draft it.

Tactics For SEO

Leaving out-of-stock product pages active (if you’re likely to restock an item) is also a discussion that SEOs will want to weigh in on.

Keeping the product page live and indexed, with any links and rankings it has gained means that you don’t have to start over again once the product returns to stock.

With the cost and effort of getting the user there whether through paid or organic search, being able to capture an email address is still a great win.

Simple Product Data Capture

Shown below is an out-of-stock product as shown on a product listings page (PLP) on John Lewis, clearly visible with an email when available CTA.

When clicking the ’email when available’ button a modal appears (shown below) that allows you to enter your email address to be notified once the item is back in stock.

If instead, you click the actual product from the listing page, you are taken through to the product page (which is no doubt indexed in Google) where the same call to action is repeated.

Putting It Into Practice

The practical steps to make this work in WooCommerce are straightforward:

1. Keep out-of-stock product pages live – Removing them loses the SEO value they’ve built up and eliminates any chance of capturing returning visitors. For the technical detail on how to manage out-of-stock pages for SEO, see our post on best practices for handling out-of-stock items.

2. Install a back-in-stock notification plugin – The Back In Stock Notifier for WooCommerce is a free, low-friction starting point. YITH WooCommerce Waitlist offers more customisation if you need it. Or you may need or want a more bespoke solution that doesn’t rely on yet anther plugin.

3. Make the notification CTA prominent – A small, easy-to-miss text link won’t perform. The notification prompt should be visually clear, in the same position and with similar visual weight to where the Add to Basket button normally sits.

4. Set up automated restock emails to fire immediately – Don’t rely on manual follow-up. The email should go out as soon as stock is restored, and it should take the customer directly to the product page.

5. Review your waitlist data regularly – Products accumulating large waitlists should trigger a review of your restock timelines and potentially your paid campaign spend.

6. Notify your paid campaigns team – Whenever a product goes out of stock, campaigns pointing to that product should be paused or redirected until stock is confirmed live.

What’s To Swipe & Deploy?

First off is keeping products you wish to restock live on your website, clearly labelled as out-of-stock. However, you can then implement a data capture sequence like the one John Lewis uses.

Some online sellers are very keen to hide out-of-stock items, but keeping them live and indexable means you can still welcome new traffic from users seeking out these products.

Adding a hide/show filter on product results/listing pages for out-of-stock items can help to improve the user experience. Whilst you can also provide a dedicated area for those items to appear. That way your users won’t get frustrated seeing out-of-stock and in-stock items intermingled.

I’d be keen to see more ways in which eCommerce websites deal with their out-of-stock items. Whether they’re good credible tactics, or on the naughty side.

What’s your shopping experience been like when you’ve encountered out-of-stock items? Drop me a message to share your thoughts.

In the meantime, if you’d like to take a look at some of the eCommerce websites we’ve designed and developed in WooCommerce, visit our case studies page.

That’s a wrap for Swipe & Deploy #6. Join me next week when I’ll share another insight or piece of inspiration from around the web.