A product page that never says whether the item is on the shelf leaves visitors assuming it is not. Show availability in plain bands from the till's stock records, and offer a way to hold an item.

The site

A yarn shop in a converted storefront on the main street of an Okanagan town. Wool, cotton and alpaca in a few hundred colours, needles and patterns, and classes two evenings a week.

Its website has a catalogue of about three hundred yarns. Each has the mill's photograph, the fibre content, the weight and a price per skein.

Nothing on any of those pages says whether the yarn is in the shop. The only clue is a line in the footer: call to check availability.

About forty of the yarns listed have been discontinued by their mills. Several more sold out months ago and were never reordered. Their pages look exactly like the rest.

The inference a visitor makes

A knitter planning a sweater finds the yarn she wants at ten in the evening. She needs eight skeins of one colour, and the shop closed four hours ago.

The page cannot tell her whether there are eight, three or none. Asking means phoning tomorrow, catching the shop between customers, and waiting while someone goes to count.

So she reads the silence instead. If they had it, the site would surely say so. And a catalogue this complete looks like a list of what the shop could order, not what it has.

Both readings send her elsewhere, usually to an online retailer that shows its stock. The shop may have had all eight in a basket by the window.

What the visitor wants to know

The third is the one a yarn shop's site most needs to answer. Yarn is dyed in batches, and skeins of the same colour from different batches can look different in a finished sweater.

So knitters buy a whole project from one batch, called a dye lot. In stock is not the answer they need. Eight from the same lot is.

A catalogue that lists everything equally

The catalogue was built from the distributors' product lists when the site launched, which is why it is so complete. It describes the range the shop can order, not its shelves.

Every page carries the same weight. A yarn with sixty skeins in the back room looks identical to one discontinued in 2017.

Visitors cannot tell the difference, so they cannot trust any of it. One wasted trip for a yarn that turned out to be a special order, and the whole catalogue becomes a list of maybes.

The phone is the only way to ask

Call to check availability moves the work off the website and onto the shop counter, and onto the customer.

The customer has to call during opening hours, which are working hours for many of them. Most browsing happens in the evening, when nobody answers.

The shop has to stop serving the person at the counter, find the yarn, count it and check the dye lots.

Some people do call. Many more decide it is not worth the bother, and the shop never learns they looked.

No way to put it aside

Even a visitor who calls and hears yes has a problem. She can come on Saturday, and it is Tuesday.

Without a way to ask the shop to hold the skeins, the yes is only true for now. A class of eight beginners could clear that colour by Thursday.

Large retailers now commonly show stock by store and offer to set it aside, so customers expect it even from a shop with two staff. Without it, the trip is a gamble again.

A worked example

The shop already rang every sale through a point-of-sale system, the software behind the till, which tracked each yarn by colour and dye lot because reordering depended on it.

Nobody had ever linked that system to the website. The catalogue was a separate list, typed in at launch by whoever built the site.

The rebuild made the till's records the source. Each yarn page now takes its figures from the till several times a day and shows one of three plain lines: on the shelf, a few left, or available to order.

Beside each colour on the shelf, the page lists the dye lots and the number of skeins in each, so a knitter can see at once whether eight match.

A hold button asks the shop to set skeins aside for three days. Requests arrive by email, and staff confirm each one before closing.

The forty discontinued yarns came off the site. Nobody updates stock on the website by hand any more, because a sale at the till is the update.

Bands rather than exact counts

Exact numbers look precise and often are not. Skeins get knitted into shop samples, sit in someone's basket while they browse, or simply go missing.

Plain bands survive that. On the shelf, a few left and available to order stay true for longer than a count of seven, and they tell the visitor what to do: come in, hurry, or ask.

Dye lots are the exception worth counting, because there the number is the whole question. Elsewhere a band is enough.

The counter-case within the site

Some shops cannot show stock usefully. A vintage or consignment shop with one of everything sells most pieces within days, and a listing would be out of date before anybody read it.

There, a dated page of recent arrivals, updated weekly, does more than any stock figure.

A small range kept current by hand, with the date of the last check shown, can also work, as long as the catalogue lists only what the shop actually carries.

For most shops with a till that tracks stock, the advice stands: show availability in plain bands, and let people hold what they want.

What to change

  1. Remove products you no longer carry.
  2. Ask whether your till system can share stock.
  3. Show availability in bands on every product page.
  4. Add a hold button with a stated time limit.
  5. Answer every hold request the same day.
  6. Date anything still updated by hand.
  7. Check five products against the shelf monthly.

Step two decides how much of the rest is work. If the till already tracks stock, the website can read it, and keeping the site honest stops being somebody's evening job.

What a product page should say once an item sells out is covered in back-to-school orders and stock that runs out.

Frequently asked questions

Why should a shop website show stock?

Because visitors read silence as no. Without availability, a product page looks like a catalogue of what the shop could order, and checking means a phone call most people never make.

Why not just ask people to call?

Most browsing happens in the evening, when the shop is closed, and a call interrupts staff serving customers. Many visitors decide it is not worth the bother and never ring.

How can a website know what is on the shelf?

Many point-of-sale systems track stock as items sell, and a website can take those figures several times a day, so a sale at the till updates the site.

Should the site show exact stock counts?

Usually plain bands work better: on the shelf, a few left, available to order. Counts drift as items go missing or sit in baskets, while bands stay true longer.

What does a hold button do?

It asks the shop to set an item aside for a stated time, confirmed by staff the same day, so a yes on Tuesday is still a yes on Saturday.

When is showing stock not worth it?

For vintage or consignment shops with one of everything, where listings would be out of date before anyone read them. A dated page of recent arrivals serves them better.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Shop website that never mentions stock?

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