Back in stock emails

[Stuart]

Hi guys,

A little issue that cropped up for us – I thought it would be useful to get some other points of view.

So say there is a product, which has gone out of stock, and a whole bunch of people have signed up for the “let me know when it’s back in stock email”. You then have a small number of returns (much lower than the number of people on the list) which are as-new and re-saleable. How do you let people know? Options in my mind are:

– Send out an email to everyone on the list, knowing that the first few people will buy the product and others will click through only to be disappointed (i’m pretty sure i’ve seen Amazon do it this way).
– Work through the list in order, giving each person say an hour to purchase, if they don’t move on to the next.
– Don’t send anything until there is enough stock to keep everyone happy, but potentially look like you didn’t send the email if someone happens to view the product page?

I’d be interested to hear how other people / other systems handle this.

Thanks!

Stuart

[Graham]

Hi Stuart,

From a customer perspective, I’d say the second option – email a bunch of customers in turn to avoid disappointment. That way they see that signing up for stock notifications was worth it.

Out of interest, what kind of response to you get from these emails?

[Stuart]

Hi Graham,

Thanks for your input. Yep that does seem like a fair way to do it – when thinking thorough it I wasn’t sure whether to explicitly say that they had say “Until 12:40 GMT Monday Jan 18th” to guarantee a purchase – or just stagger the sending. Not sure i’ve seen anything else that has done it the first way outside of concert tickets or similar. Might be quite a technical challenge to do it that way as well…

Success wise – I guess it depends on the product / time of year and length of time since they signed up as to how successful the emails are – a popular product that comes back in time for Christmas that only ran out a week ago is likely to get a much better response than something more obsure that comes back in stock 6 months later.

Best,

Stuart

[dan]

I like Graham’s answer. One thing that may also be useful to think about (as you mention that you have these products back in stock as a result of returns): If you do stagger things, you may want to take into account customers’ returns history when figuring out the order in which to stagger.

[Stuart]

Thanks Dan – very good point indeed.

[James]

Hi Stuart,
I think Graham’s answer is a good one with only one additional consideration: if you have highly relevant, popular substitute products, it may be useful to test emailing the whole list (or a bigger %) with a ‘We’ve had X more in stock, first come first served’ but then on the product landing page add a recommendation carousel of the best selling/rated substitutes that displays when the stock=0 again (maybe with an offer). You may get greater revenue than by throttling the invite.
It also depends on how often you get little bits of stock in. If it’s regularly and people keep getting ‘we’ve got more’ emails only to click and find it’s still sold out, then your response rate to future ‘back in stock’ notifications is likely to suffer as people start to distrust.
Good example is ticketing websites – i regularly sign up for notifications of additional ticket releases but on one site i’ve now had 4 emails for the same gig, and never any tickets when i click. I’ve turned off the notifications as they’re now annoying.
Thanks
james

[Stuart]

Thanks James – some quality advice all round there, really like the idea to show the recommendation carousel when the product is out of stock.
We get little bits of stock in quite regularly, but most of the time the product in question is still in stock, luckily quite rare for it to happen when it’s out of stock.

[Joey]

What a quality question and good advice all round.

I’ve implemented a recommendations widget on out of stock product pages before for a large menswear retailer that had a big chunk of traffic from their print catalog. Obviously the print version was planned ages in advance and they liked to keep products live as they had an awful lot of people that would just put the sku/id into the site search box and they didn’t want to disappoint. Depending on how many OOS products you carry at any one time you could set the recs up manually and as James suggested just select relevant alternatives. We used the behavioral engine to select highly likely alternatives and then also applied some merch rules that would look at product type, colour, fabric and other attributes so that it made as much sense as possible to the shopper.

Hope this helps

[Stuart]

Many thanks Joey – some excellent points there – I think our volume is probably a little low for a behavioural engine to come up with anything meaningful, but yeah we could probably do it manually for the most popular products and (fingers crossed) out of stock situations aren’t that often.

[Author]

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