Product Out-of-Stock Checklist
|
| ||||||||
| Compare: | Web Design Calculator | Web Design Cost Guidelines |
Are you an E-Commerce Web Designer? Add a Free Listing
Both your business and your customer suffer when products are out of stock.
How can you minimize the damage?
You may have caught our recent post Saving Sales for Out of Stock Items, which described an example from Staples of merchandising recommended alternative products when an item in a user’s cart is out of stock (OOS).
Saved shopping carts are not the only thing affected by stock-outs. Every element of your online marketing needs to be considered and tweaked to ensure customers have the best experience and you save the most dollars.
SEO
Though many online merchants do this, removing permanently out of stock products from your website is not an option if you value SEO.
Each item you delete potentially wipes out deep links from other websites, Blogs and social networks, which do help your domain’s overall “authority” with search engines. In fact, popular products that have sold out are the most likely to have attracted attention from external sites. Consider sites that turn over thousands of products per year – the aggregate loss can majorly impact SEO.
Search engines sometimes take a while to clean out “not found” pages from their indices, so you may get referrals that hit a dead end page.
You have 2 options to handle discontinued product pages: use a 301 (permanent) redirect to another page, or leave the page in tact with messaging that the product is out of stock.
A redirect will preserve most of the “link juice” from external websites, and you can aim it at the replacement product (no bait and switch!) or to the nearest product category. It also builds up the PageRank of the category you aim it to, helping it to rank higher in search engines. This is preferred over redirecting to your home page, as it’s easier for a customer to find an alternative item from a category page.
You’ll want to suppress the old product pages from categories for best usability. Linking customer reviews to public buyer profiles is a smart way to ensure they stay in your site architecture.
However, redirecting to a category page can confuse a customer, who expected to land on the product page. Keeping the product page avoids this problem. It also ensures you receive traffic for the long-tail keywords (like model numbers) that are so valuable.
The best way to optimize such a page is to clearly identify the item is out of stock (a label over the product image will surely be noticed), and show alternative or replacement products clearly.
Pay Per Click
Perhaps nothing hits your marketing budget’s efficiency harder than a leak in your PPC faucet. Not only are you missing out on sales, you’re paying Google to send you traffic to a sold out product. Having the right processes in place to catch OOS products and pause keywords is important.
George Michie from Rimm-Kaufman Group shared with Get Elastic his paid search management firm’s process for handing temporarily OOS products. RKG uses couples a system that flags products when they drop out of inventory or a data feed with a URL-checking tool that identifies landing pages with page load error messages or “out of stock” status.
Bidding on permanently out of stock items (like discontinued model numbers or software versions) can still be profitable, so long as you offer substitute product(s) and inform/merchandise your landing page accordingly.
If a product is gone for good, it’s best to remove or permanently pause keywords pointing to the product page. In some cases, keywords may be effectively applied to other Ad Groups.
Affiliate / Data Feeds
Like pay-per-click, permanently out of stock items should be pulled from shopping engine and other affiliate data feeds.
A successful email campaign can often result in a featured product selling out. There are a couple creative ways of handling this problem.
You might add an “email me when this item is back in stock” feature to your product pages for those who click through. (Again, suggesting alternative products on the landing page helps).
Or, you could dynamically update your email creative to reflect a product’s availability.
A side effect is this creates urgency for your other featured products. It suggests products are at a high risk of selling out.
If you haven’t created an out-of-stock salvage plan, now’s the time. Make sure none of the marketing resources you’ve invested ever go to waste.
Source http://www.getelastic.com/?p=10466Mon, 14 Feb 2011 09:00:44 GMT
Tags: Merchandising, SEO,
McFarland E-Commerce | Northridge E-Commerce | Coleraine E-Commerce | Oceanside-Escondido E-Commerce | Haddon Heights E-Commerce | Fort Collins E-Commerce | Tucson E-Commerce | Oklahoma City E-Commerce | Navi Mumbai E-Commerce | Maplewood E-Commerce |
Merchandising
Is Pay-What-You-Wish Pricing Wishful Thinking?
In my last year of high school, I took 4 art courses (I was expected to go to art school, and I would have, had I not had such a disdain for computers – oh, the irony). I must admit that most of those classroom hours were actually spent outside the classr
Give Customers A Little Credit
Inboxes are overflowing with discount-oriented subject lines – “Take $10 off your next purchase” or “Save $5 on the JuiceMaster 5000WKRP.” Do customers even care anymore? Did they ever? The problem with these subject lines is
SEO
SEO for small businesses on a budget
Taking a break from usability and operations that I normally address. Seobook.com published an outstanding guideline on setting up and marketing a business online on a budget. The guide is straight to the point and offers a ton of good information about h
Business seasonality, and search trends for your marketing
Chances are if you are an online retailer your have some seasonality to your business. This mainly depends on the type of products you sell, and the general type of people that purchase your products. As a B2B’ish industry we see major volume decrea
Ecommerce SEO: Black Hat Tactics That Are Not Black Hat
On the heels of our last post on SEO spam, which mentioned classic black hat SEO tricks like cloaking, doorway pages and link farms, today’s post will look at common ecommerce practices that are similar to black hat techniques but are are not agains
Need E-commerce Design? Check out our member profiles:
We provide web & graphic design, programming, marketing and business consulting services throughout the globe.
Hampton, Georgia US
Web design, Web development, Ecommerce, Website maintenance, Hosting and Business Software.
Alphen aan den Rijn, Zuid-Holland NL
NOCHALLENGE TECHNOLOGY is an emerging custom web and desktop application development company based out of Minneapolis, MN. Please contact us for all your eCommerce projects.
Savage, Minnesota US
With over a decade in the market, we have solidified the greatest way to ensure maximum profit from any eCommerce website. New or existing, we research to perfection an increase in ROI.
Appleton, Wisconsin US
Melanie Creations is a California website and graphic design company that offers a exceptional and creative approach to logo design, company branding, brochures and marketing materials and websites.
Yucca Valley, California US
Rasberry Creative New York is a web and new media agency based in TriBeCa in the heart of New York City. Offering web design, e-commerce and content managed solutions to a range of clients.
New York, New York US
WinBach Marketing Images is the right choice for creative web and graphic design solutions. Through communication and teamwork, WinBach Marketing consistently meets clients' goals and expectations.
Marina del Rey, California US
2 Ways to Challenge Your Gut Feel
This week is Data Driven Business Week in San Francisco In the spirit of making data driven decisio
5 Signs Your Hard Drive Lifetime is Ending & What To Do
Since a majority of people today own laptops and external hard drives which get dragged around quit
The 3 Steps To Setting Up Your Android Tablet’s Touchscreen Keyboard
Over a year after the initial launch of the iPad we are finally seeing some decent tablet alternati
How Big is the Ecommerce Industry? [Infographic]
What 8217 s your EQ Our friends at Invesp Consulting have produced an infographic charting the his
Why Twitter’s TweetDeck Is Worth A Second Look
In the last few months Twitter has become my favorite social networking hangout mainly because I f
Keep Track Of Your Time With Hamster [Linux]
Not sure where your time goes Keep track of it Hamster is a Linux application that helps you do ju
Latest Hilarious Picks [MakeUseOf Geeky Fun]
Check out the top picks from MakeUseOf Geeky Fun during the last couple of days I wish you knew how
Article Tags
E-commerce Design Articles
Web Apps & Internet (374)
News (291)
Web Apps (129)
Inspiration (128)
Music (119)
iPhone / iPad / iPod (116)
cool web apps (108)
Google Android (101)
Mobile Tips (100)
Announcements (99)
deals (88)
Games & Gaming Tips (84)
Tech Deals (82)
Cool Software Apps (76)
Opinion & Polls (76)
Social Media (66)
iOS (66)
Browser Tips & Tricks (66)
iPhone Apps (59)
Freebies (58)
geeky fun (58)
Photography (58)
iphone (55)
Google (53)
troubleshoot (53)
android (52)
Photoshop (52)
Graphics (51)
facebook (50)
How-To Articles (50)
Friends:
E-Commerce Website Pricing
Web Design Quote
Website Design
Graphic Designers
