Until we released the Back In Stock add-on, the main benefit of displaying out-of-stock inventory in your storefront was SEO juice. All of those pages getting indexed by search engine bots, and shopping aggregators, and price scrapers is great. But any shoppers that found those pages had to call, or email, or come back later to check and see if the item was back in stock. Which means you just lost a sale because they’re not going to do that. They’re going to buy somewhere else.
With the Back In Stock add-on installed, your customers can “subscribe” to the out-of-stock items they want to buy and they’ll get an email when it’s back in stock. That’s it. That’s how you sell out-of-stock inventory while you’re sleeping.
There’s a little more to it than that. Any time the quantity available for an out-of-stock item changes, whether that additional stock is added to your local inventory or a distributor feed is updated, the Back In Stock add-on checks to see if there is anyone subscribed to that item. If there is, they get an email with a link and you just made a sale.
To show you all of this activity going on behind the scenes, while you’re sleeping, the add-on includes a report and dashboard so you can see who is watching which items, how many notifications have been sent, and, most importantly, how many of those notifications have led to a sale.
Based on feedback we received when we first released the add-on, we’ve also rolled out a couple of enhancements related to how out-of-stock items are handled in the storefront. First, we updated the storefront search filters so that your customers can choose to hide out-of-stock items entirely if they don’t want to waste time looking at things they can’t buy right away. Second, you can now control how prices for out-of-stock items are displayed. You can display the highest available price, lowest available price, or no price. We prioritized these enhancements because some dealers where choosing not to display out-of-stock inventory to avoid frustrating customers. We think these improvements, combined with the Back In Stock add-on, makes displaying out-of-stock inventory a valuable and effective tool for search engine marketing and generating passive sales, while you sleep.