Back-to-School Orders and Stock That Runs Out

Sold out in the middle of August

For shops selling backpacks, lunch kits, school shoes and supplies, the next four weeks are among the busiest of the year. Most schools go back after Labour Day, and many parents leave the shopping late.

The popular items sell out first. The page for the backpack everybody wanted either says out of stock in small grey letters, or vanishes altogether.

Customers keep arriving at it anyway: from searches, from ads, from links shared between parents, from last year's bookmark.

They find a dead end, and most of them take the search somewhere else.

What a sold-out page usually does

• Says out of stock in small text, and nothing else.
• Keeps the add-to-cart button, which fails at checkout.
• Drops out of the category pages but stays in search results.
• Gets deleted, leaving an error page for every link to it.
• Keeps its ads running, paying for clicks on a product nobody can buy.

The fourth costs the most over time. The page's search position, its reviews and the links to it took a season to build, and deleting it throws them away just before next year needs them.

Keep the page, change what it says

A sold-out product page is still one of the best-placed pages in the shop. People arrive at it with a clear intention.

So keep it live, and make it useful. Say sold out plainly near the price, where the eye goes first, and remove or disable the add-to-cart button.

Then give the visitor somewhere to go: a restock date if there is a real one, a way to be told when it returns, and similar items that are in stock now.

Hiding sold-out items from category pages is sensible. Most shop systems can do that while leaving the product page itself reachable, which is the combination you want.

A restock date only if it is real

Supplier dates slip, especially in a busy season. A date on the page is a promise, and a broken one costs more trust than an honest unknown.

Give a specific date only when the supplier has confirmed it. Otherwise say roughly when you expect more, and that the page will be updated.

Then update it. A page still promising stock in early August, read in September, is worse than one that never gave a date.

Alternatives on the same page

Show similar items near the top, not below the reviews where few visitors scroll.

Choose them by hand for the bestsellers: the same backpack in another colour, the nearest size, the similar model at a similar price. Automatic suggestions often pick something unrelated.

For sized items, such as shoes or uniforms, say how the alternative's sizing compares. A parent ordering for a child who is not in the room needs that more than another photograph.

A worked example

An online shop selling children's backpacks and lunch kits, run by two people from a small warehouse unit, sold out of its most popular backpack in the middle of last August.

The owner unpublished the page to stop orders. Links to it from a parenting blog's back-to-school list, and from messages parents had shared, began arriving at an error page.

The page's reviews went with it. In the spring, the new season's version went up on a new page at a new address, with no reviews and no search history.

This year the page stays. It says sold out at the top, gives the supplier's confirmed date for the new colours, offers a back-in-stock signup, and shows three similar backpacks in stock.

Next summer, the new version will replace the photographs and price on the same page, at the same address, with its reviews intact.

Back-in-stock notices

Most shop systems can collect an email address on a sold-out page and send one message when the product returns, either built in or through an add-on.

Ask for the email address and nothing else. Use it for the notice that was requested, and add it to your newsletter only if the customer separately agrees.

When stock arrives, send the notice straight away. A customer told on Friday about stock that sold out again on Thursday feels misled.

Search results and ads

If the page carries product markup for search results, change its availability to out of stock too, so the listing does not promise what the page cannot deliver.

Pause ads for sold-out products, and if you run Shopping ads, make sure the product feed says out of stock. A click on something nobody can buy costs money and annoys the person who clicked.

Preparing for next season

Seasonal products come back. Their pages should wait for them rather than disappear.

Keep each seasonal page at the same address all year, marked back next July or whenever the season starts. In spring, update the photographs, prices and sizes on that same page.

Keep years out of addresses too. A back-to-school category at an address ending in 2019 has to start again next summer; one without a year carries its history forward.

When a product is gone for good, send its page to the closest replacement, by linking from the page for a while or with a permanent redirect, never simply to the home page.

The counter-case

Not every shop needs all of this.

A shop with a few dozen products, restocked weekly, may only ever be out of stock for days, and a plain notice with a restock date covers it.

One-of-a-kind items, such as vintage or handmade pieces, are different again. A sold page with similar pieces, or a gallery of past work, suits them better than a restock signup.

For seasonal bestsellers, though, keep the page, tell the truth about stock, and offer something in its place.

Before the rush peaks

1. List the products likely to sell out this month.
2. Write the sold-out wording in advance.
3. Choose two alternatives for each one.
4. Switch on back-in-stock notices.
5. Pause ads for anything that sells out.
6. Never delete a seasonal product page.
7. Take years out of seasonal page addresses.

Step six is the one that pays next summer. A page kept through the off-season returns with its reviews, its links and its place in search; a deleted one starts again from nothing.

Taking promotions down once they end is covered in summer sales and the banner that never comes down.

Frequently asked questions

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