Generate New Leads With Out Of Stock Items
How should you handle out-of-stock items on your e-commerce website, and can they be used to bring customers back and generate new sales?
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How should you handle out-of-stock items on your e-commerce website, and can they be used to bring customers back and generate new sales?
You may find it annoying, but no doubt you’ve probably at some point visited a website only to see that the product you wanted was out of stock.
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.
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.
With a low-cost promotion, John Lewis will always get clicks from those looking for core products. If they were to extend this to their entire catalogue of out-stock low-cost items, they’d generate many new visits to the website. It would be expensive with no immediate return, but would it be worth it to capture visitors’ email addresses in the process?
Is this an evil and devilish tactic…
If John Lewis wanted to provide a great user experience, these would most certainly only be temporarily out of stock. In their case, I did receive an email a few weeks later, but I’d already purchased the item elsewhere by then.
But I am sure there are many businesses deploying a similar tactic.
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.
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.
Shown below is an out-of-stock product as shown on a product listings page 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.
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.
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