10 March 2020
Quick sold out, small quantities production, the long time customs clearance, and complex procurement are common reasons why items are out of stock, but only you know this. The average customer doesn't know it. When users can not find a product on your site, they think that you are not selling it and leave for competitors.
The missing product can reduce the bounce rate, the right approach - is the main thing
If your customers didn't find the product, they would run away and would never realize that a store has dozens of similar products, and the missing one can be ordered. To retain a visitor, leave the missing product on the site, but replace the “Buy” button with “Out of stock”. Also, place a block “Similar products” and share the available models.
Add a feedback button “By order only” or “Check availability by phone” so that your sales department can process more requests from the online store. Another good option is to set up a 301 server redirect per category. For example, if there is no product “Xiaomi Redmi Note 7”, the user will be redirected to the page with smartphones “Xiaomi Redmi Note”. Doing so will increase the behavioral factor on your category pages and a potential customer will be not missed.
Google won't forgive you for deleting product pages
Do not rush to delete these pages, because after that there will be a lot of broken links that search engines really do not like. If you have a lot of missing items, move them to the bottom of the list with a checkmark that the item is temporarily unavailable. And if you're drowning in products that are no longer produced or sold, here's your plan of action:
- remove the position from the site and from the sitemap file;
- leave the page accessible via a direct link.
This will help you to avoid 404 errors on search engines. Over time, pages with inactive products will drop out of the index.
The first rule of internal search - is to keep all products in the search results
Someone is surfing through the site, and someone is looking for an item directly in the internal search of an online store. Therefore, all items must be on the results list, whether they are available or not. Also, by using dynamic filters, you can create product lists sorted by:
- categories;
- tags;
- brands;
- other priority filters.
This feature will be very useful if a customer has entered a query for a product that is temporarily unavailable. This allows the visitor to see current offers or promptly contact the manager.
A short action plan: what to do
For small sites with up to 100 pages it is recommended to show the product, but disable the “Buy” and “Add to Cart” buttons. Create a widget on the page with relevant products that the user wants to buy.
Medium-sized sites have a couple of thousand items in stock. If the product is not available anymore, set up a 301 redirect to the category page. If you expect the arrival of commodities, you should inform about their absence on the product page and offer buyers to notify them when the item will be available.
For online stores with hundreds of thousands of pages, there is one especially useful trick in addition to the above. Set a sale deadline for items with an exact expiration date. The meta tag “unavailable_after” will help you with this. It is supported by Google and will stop crawling and indexing of the desired page according to the set date.
The above recommendations will help:
- reduce the bounce rate;
- increase conversion;
- adjust customer feedback with the sales department;
- find flaws in the functionality of the site. For example, problems with internal search, incorrect output results of similar products, or incorrect redirection to a section.
