Stop losing customers! Stop losing sales! You will usually hear these from your marketing and sales consultants if they see your website fails to prepare enough inventory to meet the customer’s demand.
Out-of-stock is a huge eCommerce problem that you must address immediately since it affects your business’ financial and non-financial aspects. This leads us to produce this article to help you and guide you on how to rescue out-of-stock revenue and grow your eCommerce business.
5 Reasons Why Your Business Experiences Out-of-Stock Issues
The inventory issues usually occur because of the following reasons.
1. Item count issues.
Do not mistake the out-of-stock issues with a regular sold-out problem. They may seem similar, but the former refers to preparing the stocks before selling them to the public.
Any discrepancy or inaccuracy with the order and actual items on hand will mess up your sales system. Apart from that, your business’ shipment method and returns policy may directly affect your inventory where your computer might say that you have enough inventory of the item. Still, your warehouse may show a different thing.
2. Failing to anticipate unexpected demands.
You must be updated with the news and new trend since both will give you a heads up on whether or not a specific product will start selling, like hot cakes. Being updated gives you ample time to find ways, prepare, and re-order the item from your supplier ahead of time.
3. Supplier Issues.
Your supplier plays a vital role in your eCommerce business’ success. A good supplier who can meet your demands, send the products on time, and has excellent after-sales support is one of the keys to avoiding out-of-stock issues.
4. Lack of Funds.
Another internal issue that will indeed affect your inventory is your cash flow. A lack of funds simply means you cannot restock the items you need to replenish.
5. Management and processes issues.
A well-managed business generates profits. But if the management fails to keep track and doesn’t know precisely when to prioritize the ‘priority, urgent, and important things,’ without a doubt, your business will fail.
So, before establishing a business, you must ensure that your team understands their role and the processes that your business has to avoid any out-of-stock issues.
3 Ways to Rescue Out-of-Stock Revenue and Grow Your Ecommerce Business
At first, you might have issues and challenges to face when you rescue out-of-stock revenue and grow your ecommerce business. Follow the methods below and
1. Install a Search Optimization Plugin.
A search optimization plugin installed on your eCommerce website gives you benefits that help prevent losing customers from out-of-stock issues.
For instance, if your eCommerce store has an Expertrec Search Optimization plugin installed, you will be less likely to lose a sale completely.
Why? If a certain product is already sold out or is out of stock, Expertrec’s search optimization plugin will display the alternative product that your customer may be interested in. It helps the customer have an easy search to filter all those items or products similar to what they want.
It may not be the exact product they want, but this creates an urgency to buy the product leading your customer to purchase the alternative product instead of leaving your website and abandoning their shopping cart.
2. Notify your customers.
We cannot force the customers to buy alternative products. So, for the other customer who wants to wait for the restock, you must at least add a notification text where they can click and leave their email addresses if they want to be notified for the restock.
When adding a notifying text, it is advisable that you must include the restock date. But make sure you will have stocks on that date. Otherwise, your customers will lose their trust in you.
A simple ‘notify me when available’ will do the trick. With their emails, you can quickly notify them when you have replenished the items. But, do not just send emails to make them feel that they are valued.
Take full responsibility and apologize, assure them, and offer them some perks if needed.
3. Keep the out-of-stock product pages.
SEO refers to the process or method of improving a website or website to gather more traffic. This means that its primary role is to make your site visible to people when they search for products or services, which in return results in more site visitors and prospective customers.
In relation to the third way to rescue out-of-stock revenue and grow your eCommerce business, you must keep any SEO page on your website, including the out-of-stock pages.
SEO pages help your site display in most search engines’ first page results. Thus, it is not advisable to remove any out-of-stock revenue pages as it may cost your site to lose organic traffic and valuable link equity.
4 Effective Ways to Avoid Out-of-Stock in Ecommerce Business
1. Always have a buffer.
Anticipating the demand accurately is a plus in any eCommerce business. However, forecasting is a skill that not every eCommerce business owner has. Some may be able to forecast the trend and the demand but are still left with out-of-stock problems.
Avoid getting this problem again by adding many buffers for the items or products. This will buy you some time to replenish the product. It may also help you cover the time lost if you have issues with your suppliers or delivery schedule.
2. Check your inventory regularly.
You need to keep track of your stocks. Check your inventories regularly to ensure that both the physical and your system’s recorded stocks are in sync. Invest in reliable software to help you manage your stocks.
But do not just buy inventory software for the sake of getting one. Choose reliable software that can be integrated with your eCommerce store, POS, and your stock system.
3. Automate the process.
Automating the process makes everything easy and flawless. This is one of the best ways to avoid out-of-stock problems in eCommerce businesses. If your eCommerce business has an automated process to replenish the stocks, you will not worry about losing from out-of-stocks.
4. Always have a back-up supplier.
Do not just stick with one supplier. Anticipate that there are times your supplier might not meet your demands. So, it is better that you have at least 2 or 3 suppliers to ensure that you will not be running out of stocks.
Conclusion
Losing sales from out-of-stocks is inevitable. But, there are some ways that you can use to avoid this problem in the near future. Use this article as your guide on rescuing out-of-stock revenue and growing your eCommerce business, and you will surely see an improvement in your sales metrics.
