Ecommerce  sites are constantly struggling with this question and it is a good debate to have. When you sell consumer goods, fast-moving or otherwise, you’ll find that your items come in and out of stock very quickly. You’ll also find that there are often times when items will have to be set to ‘do not sell’ due to manufacturing issues somewhere down the chain. This can be especially true of products with a high stock turnover, which can be fraught with issues up and down the supply chain.

Managers of an ecommerce website struggle with the issue of whether to un-publish a product from the website. All it takes is a balancing of both sides and it’s relatively easy to decide which avenue is best for your business in the long run.

Going-going-gone

When stock items are gone and you’re awaiting new stock for the site, it can often be the easiest thing to just remove it from the website altogether; doing this has pros and cons. Taking your product off the site could affect your search rankings for that product for some time because the older version of that page will still show in the search results as the search engines can take a little bit of time to clean out these 404 pages or ‘not found’ pages. Customers might well be driven through to error pages for a little while, which could result in an increase in customer care or customer service enquiries asking where the items have gone.

The problem with un-publishing products in this way is that there is no clear message being pushed out to the customer; this could irritate consumers coming to the site, if they can’t find what they want to purchase. Without being informed directly, consumer confidence can be affected and the consumer will likely be driven elsewhere to purchase the desired item.

Out of stock, still in sight

Another way to approach the problem is to create a graphic that is added to product pages when an item is out of stock. This is a simple way to alert customers to stock control issues without removing the page altogether. Most ecommerce platforms have an option within the product data to set the product to out of stock when stock runs down, which can either be hard-coded or done with the stock measurement function within the platform.

Although customers will likely be disappointed that they can’t purchase the item, it lets them know clearly that there is an issue with stock and that this should be resolved quickly. A clear message like this is much more likely to encourage them to check back regularly to get what they want. This out of stock message could also be tailored with an intelligent cross-sell and information – if you have it – on when the item will be back in stock.

An out-of-stock message on a product page is a much better option because it keeps the page ‘live’. Although customers might be unhappy in the short-term that they can’t purchase the item in question, they are much more forgiving when they are receiving a clearly communicated message over a page that’s missing completely from the site…and of course it’s great for SEO to keep the page ‘live’ because if you do take the page offline it could take some time for the search engines to re-list that page in their search results.

Paul