Currently out of stock. How to Provide SEO for Out-of-Stock Product Pages

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68% of online stores do not offer visitors to buy products with the status “In stock”, “Product sold out”, “Product out of stock”. When visitors are not allowed to place an order for an out-of-stock product, they will go to competitors. What to do?

According to our usability testing, when visitors are told that a given product is out of stock, there are two possible options. Some visitors will look for alternative products on your site, but 30% of visitors will simply give up searching for a product on your site and go to competitors.

When visitors see text that a product is out of stock, this is a usability dead end. Visitors will not be able to continue on the site if they are truly committed to purchasing that particular product.

We often conduct usability audits of websites and see that most online stores do not allow visitors to place orders for missing products. This significantly increases the likelihood that a user who wants to purchase a specific product will leave the site and find this product from competitors.

In this article we will look at what an online store should do when goods are out of stock. In particular, we will look at:

• Why visitors should be allowed to temporarily purchase goods.
• Why is the notification by e-mail and save to wishlist are not sufficient strategies for temporarily out-of-stock items.
• What to do when a product is no longer for sale.

Difference between "out of stock" and "not available"

By informing users that an item is out of stock and removing the “Add to Cart” button. You completely stop your visitor and prevent him from buying the product.

Let's consider two situations. If a product is not available in an offline store, then the product is truly not available to the user. IN ecommerce There is a built-in time delay. And thus visitors do not expect to receive the product immediately.

Users initially understand that they will have to wait for the product when shopping online. From the point of view of site owners, there is no downtime: users complete the ordering process, confirmation emails are sent emails, order processing begins and goods are prepared for shipment. However, from the user's perspective, there is always a period of downtime while they wait to receive their order. Depending on the delivery method chosen, this can vary from a few hours to several weeks.

This period of time, starting from the moment when the visitor left the order and when it is expected to actually be received, can be effectively used. Allowing visitors to place orders for items that are temporarily out of stock.

For example, an online store may have a dress that is extremely popular in red. While other dress options (black, white, etc.) are less popular. Consequently, the red dress is often out of stock, although the stock is regularly replenished by the company. Because it is known that the red dress will almost certainly be restocked within a reasonable time frame and that the user may only need 2-3 days to receive the item. That effective method The solution to the out-of-stock problem is simply to increase the delivery time for the red dress.

Why email notifications and wishlists are not an alternative

From the picture you can see the visitor got to the product page only to find out that the product was out of stock. Instead of losing a potential sale, consider allowing visitors to temporarily purchase out-of-stock items.

Basic strategies that many sites often use for out-of-stock items are:

But these strategies work very poorly with users.

Providing an “Email Me” button essentially tells visitors, “Check back later when the item is back in stock.” If the product is unique or difficult to find elsewhere, then visitors will click on this button. But for many users, this notice tells them that they should look for the product on another site. Will end up being ignored this button. Why wait when a visitor can buy a product immediately on a competing site?

Allowing visitors to add a product to their wishlist can also lead to problems. Considering that 75% of sites require users to create account to use this "save" feature. Therefore, most visitors will not use the Save to Wishlist feature, making the feature useless for out-of-stock items.

Users have a strong aversion to being forced to create an account. Thus, users are unlikely to use any of the "Add to List" or "Save for Later" features, given their desire to avoid the hassle of creating an account.

As a result, “Ship to me when in stock” or “Save to Wishlist” features should not be used as primary strategies for temporarily out-of-stock items.

Effective techniques when a product is out of stock

To allow visitors to purchase an item that has an "out of stock" or "in stock" status, you must first determine whether the item is:

• Temporarily out of stock.
• The sale of the product has been permanently discontinued or the product has become obsolete.

Scenario No. 1: product is temporarily out of stock

If an item is temporarily out of stock when a user attempts to purchase it, but is expected to be restocked soon. Then the sites allow visitors to add the item to the cart and simply increase the delivery time. In some cases, users may not even realize that an item is currently out of stock if the product is restocked regularly and therefore the delivery time is not much later than if the item was technically in stock.

It's also worth considering providing a tooltip or text somewhere on the product page (for example, next to the Buy button). And explain to visitors why this product has an extended waiting time.

Of course, sometimes visitors do not want to wait for goods with an extended delivery time. Therefore, it is important to place in the product card - alternative options. It is important that the products are alternatives to the current product, and not additional offers of the product. This way, visitors can either receive the item with extended delivery or choose an alternative item and receive it earlier. In any case, the user is allowed to purchase the product on the site. And there is no dead end, like on many sites.

Scenario #2: The product is no longer sold

If a product is truly unavailable, then users should be informed of this fact in the product card. If you don't provide alternative products, visitors will go searching for the product on a competing site. This represents a lost opportunity for the company since it already knows what product visitors are interested in based on the outdated product.

Therefore, for obsolete or discontinued products, alternative products should be promoted very aggressively. Alternative products should be shown at the top of the product card. For example, as a replacement for the “Buy” button.

Providing users with the opportunity to temporarily buy out-of-stock products is a guarantee for the company that visitors will purchase the product from you and will not be forced to go to competitors.

Testing showed that the “Send by” button Email notification availability" or wish lists are less effective than orders. Therefore, they should be avoided as the only strategy for temporarily out-of-stock items.

Strategy: For temporarily unavailable products

• Allow users to purchase products by simply increasing delivery time.
• Provide alternative products for users who are sensitive to long delivery times.

Strategy: For discontinued or obsolete products

• Let visitors know that the item will not be available for purchase. Specifically, prominently display the text—“Discontinued” or “Obsolete”—at the top of the product card.
• Promote alternative products to encourage them to continue searching for products on your site.

Conclusion:

Remember that ultimately the goal is to get visitors to buy from your site and not from your competitors' sites. These strategies will help you do just that by taking advantage of the time lag in online shopping.

Read other useful articles

Dear colleagues!

In this article, I am going to discuss with you in detail the existing product availability statuses in Bitrix; what parameters of the trade catalogue, SKU, components influence the determination of these statuses, as well as the possibility of purchasing certain goods; and whether there are any shortcomings in the standard Bitrix templates and components related to the availability of goods.

1. Product availability statuses
I think it’s no secret that in Bitrix there are only two product availability statuses: “In stock” and “Out of stock”. And these statuses depend on three parameters of the trade catalog:

Availability in stock: Every online store administrator and 1C-Bitrix programmer should know this simple formula like 2x2.
We can add an item to your cart and place an order with it only if its status is “In Stock”. Items that are missing cannot be purchased.
But very often in online stores you can find other availability statuses and purchase scenarios. The product may be out of stock in the store in this moment, but it has already been ordered from suppliers and is being taken to the store. Typically, such products indicate an approximate date of arrival in the store, and it can already be purchased.
It is also very common to purchase goods “To order”. Usually such goods are never stocked in the store due to large dimensions, low demand/turnover specific model or a number of other reasons, but the goods are available from the suppliers with whom it works trading platform. Such products are available for purchase upon order. The buyer places an order and pays for the purchase, the store orders the goods from the supplier, and then immediately sends it to the final buyer.
Since two latest script are not supported by Bitrix out of the box; their implementation requires any additional modules and modification of templates. Bitrix has the ability to subscribe to missing products: you can put the missing product in the cart, where it will appear in a separate tab, and after this product appears in the warehouse, the user will be sent an email notification that the product has appeared in the store and can be purchased buy. This is also quite a convenient and useful thing, but it performs a slightly different function.

In our work, when developing standard solutions, we often come across clients who need a “Made to Order” purchase scenario.
In the standard solution "Bitronik" such functionality was implemented by creating a separate property FOR_ORDER (To order) in the information block with the catalog in the form of a checkmark. If you check this box for a product, its availability status bar is colored yellow, and the text changes to “to order”.
When adding support for this status to the standard solution "Bitronik 2", it was decided to abandon the creation of additional entities and use those already available in Bitrix standard parameters trade catalogue. It seems to us most logical to display the “On order” status in the case when the product has quantitative accounting enabled, the available quantity is equal to or less than zero, and purchase is allowed in the absence of the product. Thus, we already have three statuses, which depend on the parameters of the trade catalog:

Product status: Since, from the platform’s point of view, such products have the usual status CATALOG_AVAILABLE, they are always displayed in the catalog, you can add them to the cart and place an order. The status differs only in the visual indication in the catalog templates. Also in update 2.8.5 it is planned to add text that will appear when you hover your mouse over tiles with the “to order” status. The site administrator will be able to edit this text and indicate delivery times or other information about such goods.

Dear colleagues, please write in the comments whether in your work you have encountered the need to display additional product statuses in online stores on Bitrix, and how you solved such problems. And is it necessary to add new availability statuses to standard functionality Bitrix, or should these tasks remain on the shoulders of Marketplace developers and be solved at the level of specific implementations? We are very interested to know your opinion.

2. Dependence of availability status on the quantity of goods in individual warehouses.
Starting with version 12.5 in Bitrix, it has become possible to create warehouses and fill the available quantity of goods in each individual warehouse. At the same time, it is written everywhere that the quantity of goods in warehouses is for informational purposes only and does not affect the calculation of product balances and determination of its availability in the store. This is true, but only if Inventory accounting is not enabled.
Unlike regular quantity accounting, inventory accounting cannot be turned on or off for any individual product. This functionality is enabled only for the entire site in the settings of the Online Store module. After enabling the functionality, the fields for editing both the total quantity of goods and the quantity of goods in individual warehouses will be blocked everywhere. It will be possible to change the quantity of goods in warehouses only by creating and posting documents. At the same time, the main field with the total quantity of goods will also change, which affects the availability status of the goods. That is, the total quantity of goods (CATALOG_QUANTITY) will always be equal to the sum of balances in all warehouses at permanent job warehouse accounting.
More details about this functionality can be found in training courses:
, .

3. When SKUs come into play.
The appearance of goods with trade offers in the store catalog somewhat complicates the architecture of the catalog and the understanding of how, where and what availability statuses should be displayed. This is due to the fact that the balance of the product and the parameters of quantitative accounting in Bitrix can be set both for the product itself and for its individual trade offers. And even if you do not see the “Trade Catalog” tab for the main product, but only the “Trade Offers” tab, these values ​​will still be calculated for the main product separately.
In the last and final third part of this article, I will try to unravel this tangle and bring to light the darkest corners standard template Eshop for online stores, which many people use as a basis when creating their templates.

First, let's look at a small example of how missing trade offers were displayed in the penultimate version of Eshop:

As you can see, missing products have excellent indication. But what if we don’t want to display missing products in the list? For this purpose, the bitrix:catalog complex component has a wonderful parameter “Do not display products that are not in stock” (HIDE_NOT_AVAILABLE).

After enabling this option, we see a very strange and unexpected result:

Only the "Fire in the Night" costume was displayed correctly. Those trade offers that we cannot buy disappeared from him, and the product itself remained on the list, because in its settings we disabled quantitative accounting. The remaining products with trade offers have disappeared from the list, although they have trade offers in stock, because the goods themselves do not have any parameters set to determine their availability.
We also disabled pre-quantitative accounting for the main product “Evening Sports” so that it remains on the list. But it doesn't have any of the trade offers in stock, so the template starts to think that it's just an ordinary product and offers us to buy it, which is essentially meaningless.
Even more inconsistencies appear if we add the use of a filter:

Regarding the problem with the filter and missing SKUs, on 04/29/15 we created a request to 1C-Bitrix technical support No. 623234, we were told that the HIDE_NOT_AVAILABLE option does not yet work with trade offers. Based on the request, an application was created to the development department No. 47001. There have been no further messages from the development department since then.

Fortunately, at least one of these problems in Bitrix has been fixed in the new Eshop 15.5. When we want to hide out-of-stock products, products whose sales offers are out of stock will not have a buy button.

To hide such a product from the list, you need to additionally go to the settings of the trade catalog for this individual product, enable quantitative accounting, prohibit purchase if the product is not available and set the quantity to 0. But when its trade offers appear in stock again, you need to go to the settings of the main product and disable quantitative accounting for it again so that it appears in the list. Bitrix does not yet want to undertake obligations to automatically track and synchronize the availability status of the main product and its trading offers.

In some cases, store owners do not want to give the opportunity to purchase goods with trade offers in the list, but only from the detail page. For example, because there are a lot of these characteristics. Or a fundamentally different approach is simply used: trade offers are displayed in the form of a table only on detail page goods. In such cases, you need to hide the purchase button in the list, display the minimum price from the product’s available trading offers with the mark “from …” and add a note that to purchase you need to go to the detailed page.
What to do with the product availability status in this case? When developing our templates, we are guided by the following principle:

If a product has at least one sales offer in stock, set the status to “In Stock”. If there are no such offers, but there is at least one trade offer with the “On order” status, we set the same status. If all trade offers are out of stock, set the status to "Out of stock".

In order to summarize all of the above about trade offers, I compiled the following table:

At the moment the most big problem The fact remains that products with trade offers disappear from the list, even if trade offers are available, but we set the main product to be absent in the trade catalog settings. At the template level, this is difficult to deal with, since products disappear from $arResult even at the stage of operation of standard Bitrix components.

We do not know how long it will take Bitrix to correct this situation, as well as to fix the filter for trade offers while simultaneously hiding missing products.
But as always, we believe, hope, wait...

Everyone knows and remembers that our native language is great and powerful, and also contains a large number of different rules. First, let's recall some of these rules. I will say right away that in some cases it is allowed to write both “in stock” and “in stock”. Now let’s try to figure out where and how to write them correctly. To do this, we need to restore in memory such a concept as case. There are six cases in the Russian language: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, prepositional. In order to understand how to use it correctly "in stock" and "in stock" we will need to consider two of them.

Accusative

If we put nouns in the accusative case, then they will answer the questions: whom? What? and also, if they end in ie (for example: AVAILABILITY), then they will end with the letter E.

Let's look at an example: I believe in your money.

Prepositional

Nouns, here they will answer questions about whom? about what? Now let’s take a noun ending in i (for example: PRESENCE); in the prepositional case, such nouns will have endings in the letter I.

Let's consider next example: I believe that you have a conscience.

Based on your literacy and knowledge of the rules from the Russian language school course, you will always be able to determine the case and write the right word with the correct ending.

In Russian, the case forms of the noun “nalichie” with the endings –i, -e are used as equivalents, therefore the spelling “in the presence” and “in the presence” is considered correct in both cases, although it differs fundamentally depending on the case.

The choice of ending – и or –е in the noun “presence” should be correlated with the semantic content of the sentence, which requires the accusative or prepositional case form of this noun.

In stable combinations with the verbs “to have”, “to be” it is used in the prepositional case: “to have available”; "to be available".

According to the rules existing in Russian grammar, nouns that have initial form before the case ending the vowel “and”, in the prepositional case it is written with the ending –i.

Nominative: genius, knowledge, presence

Prepositional: about genius about lithium in knowledge at the waist in stock

Since the stress in nouns like “knowledge”, “doubt”, “skill”, “presence” falls on the root vowel, their pronunciation eliminates the sound difference between -e/- and at the end of the word. It is difficult to determine by ear which ending is present in these words. To avoid making a mistake, you need to remember: the accusative case of nouns ending in -iya coincides with the nominative case.

Nominative: (who? what?) knowledge doubt skill presence

Accusative: (who? what?) knowledge doubt skill presence

In the accusative case, the noun “presence” with the preposition “in” is used very rarely: as a rule, only in patterns used in business style. For example:

Availability of indexed units household appliances included vacuum cleaners and fans in the amount of 5 copies.

Much more often in written and oral speech, the combination “in the presence” is used as a form of the prepositional case with the preposition “in”, which serves to connect the control between the verb and the noun “presence”:

To conduct an experiment, you must have reagents and equipment available.(in stock – Suggestion item)

The pharmacy has a complete list of medications intended forfor emergency medical care. (in stock – Suggestion item)

So, the difference in endings -е/-и in the combinations “in presence” - “in presence” depends on the case form of the noun: in the prepositional case the word is written with –i, in the accusative case – with –e; there are no other options.

the site determined that the difference between the combinations “in stock” and “in stock” is as follows:

1. “In stock” is the prepositional case form of the noun presence with the preposition “in”, which is formed using the ending –i. The letter -e is written at the end of the accusative case of this noun.
2. The prepositional case of a noun with the preposition “available” is formed according to the type of nouns ending in –i, -i, -i. The form of the accusative case “in presence” coincides with the nominative case.
3. The form "in stock" is widely used in oral and writing. The combination “available” is rarely used due to its semantic limitations.