Often, I have gone to a site's home page to find several home page specials clearly displayed with one or more of them indicating that they are SOLD OUT or OUT OF STOCK. Usually, either the image thumbnail has been altered or the product name has been updated to have words clearly visible. I've even received an email newsletter on occasion with a scattering of the products and thumbnails in the newsletter with the same indication.

My first thought was that this is pretty silly. Why feature a product in a prominent place when it is plainly not available? Why waste space or home page retail for a product that will generate no sales?

Then I thought about the fact that this may be done on purpose. If a customer comes to a site and sees a product marked as "Out of Stock" they learn a few things up front, perhaps subconsciously.

1. The site keeps track of inventory. This can be reassurance for those concerned that they may order something only to learn later it was out of stock.
2. This site has other customers and is receiving regular orders. This is a boost to the confidence meter for those worried they are shopping at a "fly-by-night" that is going to scam them.
3. This site's products are good. I mean other people are buying them, right? So jump on the bandwagon!
4. Their products are selling out, perhaps quickly. "Psst, catch this deal quick, cuz they might sell out!"
5. The good deals seen today may be gone tomorrow. This can give the skittish customer a little nudge of urgency.

There are more reasons along the same lines, but I think you get the idea.

So perhaps a few "Out of Stock" products are left visible or prominently scattered on purpose. Does this work as a sales technique? Has anyone tried it? What are your thoughts on using this? I don't mean to suggest that this is 'tricking' customers, as I believe no one will really buy something if they don't want it. But does this work and what do you think about using it?

No, it doesn't, if you need sold out products to make people believe that you are a real company then you have serious trust issues that need to be addressed with your website.

There is a simple rule in retail:

Full shelves sell more - simple as that. If a customer comes to your site and finds several items they want out of stock, they aren't gonna get excited and go on a buying frenzy to catch the deals. They are gonna go to another site that has what they want in stock and you just lost a customer.

I wouldn't suggest testing this theory out, unless of course you sell what I sell ;)

Yes, that is exactly what I thought! I can't really figure out why a site would do this otherwise. Perhaps the successful sites I saw doing this on occasion - like www(dot)tigerdirect(dot)com - were simply being as honest as possible about the products on their site and had not yet removed these products from their listings on the site.

I guess one technique that might be valuable to learn from this relates to newsletters and the product thumbnails. If you send out a newsletter with fast-selling products and include products and <img /> references to their thumbnails in a table in the body of the newsletter, you can quickly indicate to the receivers when a product goes out of stock by modifying the thumbnail.

For instance, let's say you send out a newsletter today, but a receiver does not open their email and SEE the newsletter for another week or two. By that time, some of the products may be unavailable. If you update the thumbnail, the image reference in the email will still be the same and will give updated information to the customer. This will not only save them the time it would take to visit your site and waste bandwidth looking for a product that is no longer available, but would also save them from being disappointed and frustrated. In addition, their eyes would be directed farther along in the newsletter to products that you DO have in stock.

Are there any clients out there that use this or similar techniques? Thanks!

Perhaps their platform offers this method of adding a "Out of Stock" banner across image instead of making product disappear? Customer would then at least know the product is normally available at this site.
Steve

I have seen this on Overstock dot com as well. They have many items that are out of stock and some that read that there are only a few left. For a auction or clearance type site I guess that would be a motivation incentive to get people to buy, but I don't know about a standard site.

ya I used to keep out of stock items visible on my site, but I kept getting complaints about it so now I hide them when they go out of stock.

I keep items that are out of stock on mine, but that is because there are so many region specific coffees that people look for, and are willing to pay the high price for those, that they will keep checking back until we have them in stock. Like Jamaican Blue Mountain, which due to the Hurricanes and all had a HORRIBLE crop and has been even more rare to find than normal. This has taken the retail price of this coffee from $45 per pound to about $60-$70. The bad thing is that we are getting requests daily for this and are not able to provide.

James
This is also why did a "wish" some time ago to be able to state more in the product editor under Inventory Display than None
In Stock Y/N
Item Count.

We should be able just as in variants etc to control that field to add more display options!

Our old shopping cart allowed us to change an out-of-stock product to say "Out-of-Stock" and then the "Buy" button to a "Backorder" button. For popular products we always sold more when the customer could only backorder the item. Then sales would cool a little when it would be back in stock.

This however was a big PIA. We did not have a good backend program to handle backorders. We had to keep track of them by hand. We also had to either split shipping charges, or charge them all upfront, either way it upset customers. We dealt with lots of "when will my items ship?" e-mails. Sometimes the items would get discontinued.

It got so bad we just eventually quit doing it and took out-of-stock products off the site. I'd like MC to have this functionality but it also needs to make two separate orders in the process. One for instock items and one for backordered items.

Whoops! I'm way off topic.

Yes, we have seen an increase in sales when an item of ours appears to be scarce. I think a lot of people browse and say, "I really want one of those one day." But if its out-of-stock and can be backordered, I think it changes to, "I better order it now or I may never get it."

Anyone thought of adding an RSS feed to notify subscribers when items are back in stock?

Good Topic!

one of our main items on our home page was Sold Out quickly, this item was also printed as a thumbnail on letters to customers that were included in each package. The dilema was; If we remove the item from the site that customers will get angry when they log on and can't find it.

Our solution was to remove the item from the home page to its regular place and change the pricing to a custom message ; Sold out !
(advance edit>advance options>hide regular price>display message)

I think that it increased our sales, customers are calling to inquire about other items in that category and one can sense the urgency bin their voice.

Again we did not plan it but I can see the use of it in a clever responsible sales campaign

MonsterMod,

Your theory is very intriguing and I believe that there is definitely some truth in it. While I have no doubt that you will not sell the item listed as 'sold out', it should demonstrate to your customers that you ship quickly - especially at this time of the year. The trick would be to have a lesser common variant sold out, but have another similar product available.

So I guess it wouldn't work for coffee... However, if you are selling UV LED lights for cars, you might have 3 selections for the color of the casing of the led lights: pink, chrome, and black. Since no one would buy a pink colored headlight, you could label that as 'out of stock'. This would direct peoples focus over to the other products which are more likely to sell. Who knows?

In any case, I think monstermod's theory makes sense and likely has a degree of accuracy. It is the little things like this that makes me a commerce customer. I definitely plan to test out this premise on my store.

I hope to see the ability to put up a 'out of stock' banner on the next version. I hope that we won't have to wait until a backorder function is developed with it though.

Happy holidays everyone.


Victor