As of today you have hidden your sold out products for the last time!
You have a sold out product, the customer goes in vain as the product is hidden and buys it on another webshop. This creates a dominoeffect, because you lose revenue and important data. Shopify has a solution for that.
Instead of hiding products from your Shopify webshop, you should you should take advantage of the many benefits that Shopify gives you when a product is sold out.
Instead of hiding the products, you can increase your revenue despite the sold out tag and gain insight into what your customers actually want, which can also give you important data. It may be that you get the insight that more home needs to be ordered.
When running af webshop, the most important and difficult task is to perfect your marketing- and salesfunnel to reach out and get more customers who are ready to buy. The average conversionrate for webshops i between 1-4%. This is also the case, talking about the biggest and most succesful online brands.
If you hide your sold-out products, it helps to lower the conversion rate further, as the product you have hidden may be the product your customer is looking for. Best-selling products in particular tend to be sold out more frequently than other products.
So what can you do to stop losing potential sales without creating a bad customer experience? Here are some steps you can take to begin the process of preparation for mediation
Move sold-out products to the bottom of your collections
Bestseller ReSort analyzes the sorting rules you set and re-orders products in selected collections according to these rules.
Set and combine custom sorting rules globally or individually per collection.
Automatically sort and order products by:
- Generated revenue (in X number of days)
- Number of sales (in X number of days)
- Gross profit
- Discount (% or $)
- Stock quantity
- Sort by tags (Import / export tags to sort by)
- Date (after release or creation date)
- Product titel
- Product prices
- Product views
- Random product order
Offer pre-orders or notifications of when the sold-out products will be back in stock
Even if the item is out of stock, you should offer your customers a way to show interest. This can typically be done either by allowing pre-orders or by collecting the customer's email address to tell when the item is back in stock.
To enable pre-orders, simply select the "Continue selling when sold out" checkbox in product details under the "Inventory" section. This means that customers will be able to buy the item as usual, even if it is not in stock. If a product has multiple variants, edit each inventory variant specifically.
You can also use the app: Back In Stock which notifies customers via SMS and / or e-mail when a sold-out product is available. With this feature, there is no need to hide popular items or move them to the bottom of your collection pages when they are sold out.
Using the Back In Stock app, you can change the text and visuals of the buttons to suit your website. When you then reorder your stock, the app automatically sends an email or text message to your customer with the information that they can now complete their purchase without you having to do anything.
Several themes also offer a product template called "pre-order". Here, "Add to cart" will change to "pre-order", so that customers have no doubt that they will not receive their purchase until the item is in stock again.
Do not hide the products by removing the release of them
Many brands do not want to show sold out products at all and just want to hide them.
Shopify offers two ways to hide products. You can either set the product status to draft or remove the publication from the online store channel. Unfortunately, both paths will lead to a non-existent page and generate a 404 error. This is a major problem for search engines like Google.
So what's the best way to hide the product from your website but still keep the URL active for Google and others?
Remove the products from the store's collections. If you use automatic collections, you can simply add a rule that the inventory should be greater than 0.
