Conversion Optimization & Analytics Services

Just recently we provided our free website inspection service to an e-commerce store and one thing I noticed was that too many items were “out of stock” in their search result pages, which didn’t look good as you can see in the example below.

The problem with having too many out of stock items is it could put your shoppers off causing them to look elsewhere, which means a loss in revenue. So how to deal with it?

1. don’t display “out of stock items” – problem with this solution is that your products could rank well in search engines and by switching them off (not showing them) you could lose that valuable free organic traffic driving your sales and possibly decrease your revenue too. Plus those visitors who specifically came to your site to look for product which you had to switch off as it’s “out of stock”, could leave.  So this a no, no solution.
2. don’t show “in stock” or “out of stock” message in the search result page – the point here is that you want visitors to have a look at your merchandise by going to the product page even though the product is out of stock like target.com does. This will leave you with an opportunity to offer to them to receive an email notification once the product is back in stock.

Overstock.com does the job of offering out of stock e-mail notifications really well. Overstock.com will not ask you to register, login or anything else. All you need to do is simply enter you email address as shown in the example. Job done.

Then once the product is back in stock you will receive this e-mail notification.

Do you have any other valuable solutions? Let us know.