Occasionally, products go out of stock – all Shopify merchants face this dilemma from time to time. Sometimes, this is because the product's incredibly popular, but unfortunately, it can be a result of supplier unreliability or other un-mitigating circumstances. If this ever happens to your store, you'll have to communicate to shoppers that the product is out of stock. The easiest way is to use the Shopify Out-of-Stock Police App.
This app organizes merchandise in your online product catalog according to what you have in and out of stock. It’s a straightforward way of keeping your customers engaged with your site, maintaining strong sales figures, and proper SEO optimization.
So, with that being said, let's explore how Shopify Out-of-Stock Police does precisely that..
What's Out-of-Stock Police?
In short, Out-of-Stock Police is a Shopify app for ecommerce store owners, available to install via the Shopify app store.
It helps you manage items on your online shop that are temporarily out of stock. Developed by EGNITION, it aims to help entrepreneurs keep their stock organized, visible, and easy to sell.
If you’re selling hundreds or thousands of products,
you want your site to continue to look lively and active. The last thing you want is pages littered with ‘out of stock' notices. This is a sure-fire way of coming across as unprofessional. You don’t want to present tons of ‘useless' options to a customer. Needless to say, for the shopper, this is incredibly frustrating. They may even leave your store if they're looking for something specific – not cool.
How Does Out-of-Stock Police do This?
Put simply, rather than causing out of stock items to ‘disappear,' them to the bottom of your product collections.
All you have to do is enable collections for the app, and Out-Of-Stock Police does the rest. As a result, you have more time to focus on sales and restocking your merchandise, rather than managing where products sit on your site.
Out-of-Stock Police's Most Notable Features
- Boosts SEO
- Automatically pushes out-of-stock items to the bottom of your sales pages and raises them when they're back in stock.
- Allows search engines to keep out-of-stock products in their search engine index, which is great for SEO.
- You can see an inventory count for enabled collections in specified locations.
- Automatically assign/un-assign a tag to sold-out products.
- Access to around the clock customer support
Let's delve into some of these features in greater depth…
Out-of-stock Items Boost SEO
When customers search for items, out of stock products still come up because search engines don't omit these. Of course, for search engines, their focus is whether the landing page is available. As such, out of stock pages are still indexed.
Whereas, Out-of-Stock Police allows you to use SEO to your advantage, by letting customers know when out-of-stock items will be back in on your site. If your customers really want that item, they’ll wait for it. If products are hidden, the pages will be de-indexed, and you could miss out on those all-important sales. This is beneficial from an organic traffic perspective and allows search engines to drive more visitors to your store.
Out-of-Stock and In-Stock Items
This app organizes your product collections which results in improved user journey for your customers.. As we've already hinted at, in-stock products are pushed to the top of the page. It stands to reason, if customers can see what’s readily available, they're more likely to buy.
If all they see are items they can’t buy, they’ll go elsewhere.
If, however, your items aren’t available for a long time, you can hide them. You can amend your app settings so that if the products in question don’t come back within a specified period, those items will be automatically hidden. This helps you to adjust collections to your inventory cycles without additional manual work.
There’s also an automated option you can select, meaning the app will automatically push down out-of-stock products daily within your chosen collections.
Tagging
The app assigns all out-of-stock items a tag so you can create smart collections. It's easy to move products in or out, and the tag's automatically removed when an item comes back in stock.
Support
You can access 24/7 support via the Shopify Help Center. Customers can type in their questions, or access the Shopify Community forum to engage with other ecommerce store owners. You can also access help via Instant Chat, Twitter, email, and phone.
It’s worth stressing that their mean communication channel is their chat bubble. Their customer support team is incredibly responsive and helpful. There’s always someone available to answer support questions. So, it’s monitored 24/7 365 days a year. But, it’s not a real-time chat. Depending on the priority and importance of the question the reply could come within minutes. About 60% of their support requests are resolved within the first hour or two.
Why Not Hide Sold-out Products?
Arguably, you could just hide products that are no longer available. But, pushing out of stock items to the bottom of a page allows you to create a sense of urgency. A sort of ‘buzz' that encourages them to either buy available products or sign up to find out when the out-of-stock items will come back in again.
It’s a way of demonstrating to customers that your store's in-demand, with minimum effort. Plus, you gain valuable consumer data from the customers that subscribe to stock availability alerts.
In short, you’re giving yourself a higher chance of staying engaged with your customers even if the item they want isn’t there!
Reviews
Overall, reviewers love this app. Most users give this solution a 5-star rating. They like how easy it is to use, how it organizes out-of-stock items to the bottom of the page and its excellent customer support.
Pricing
There’s a free 7-day trial, as well as a free package (Bronze). After that, there are four paid-for plans:
- Silver: $4.99 a month
- Gold: $9.99 a month
- Platinum: $14.99 a month
- Rhodium: $19.99 a month
You will get 100% of the functionality on any plan. All plans have all the options which app offers, which include:
- Automated processes: pushing out-of-stock items down, tagging out-of-stock products, and hiding out-of-stock products
- Other custom sorting rules
- 24/7 Support
The pricing structures vary according to how many products you have for processing and how big your collections are.
With the Bronze package, you can process up to 49 products and 99 collections. With the Silver, it’s 499 products and up to 99 collections. Whereas the Gold it’s 4,999 products and up to 99 collections, for the Platinum, it’s 9,999 products OR 100-300 collections, and with the Rhodium, it’s 10,000+ products or 300+ collections.
Overall Impression
Here’s an app that improves your customers’ experience by limiting their exposure to your out-of-stock items while engaging your audience with the products you do have in-stock.
It's one more way of helping improve conversions and, therefore, overall sales figures. As an addition, the app helps in keeping your SEO in check and removes manual work related to managing out-of-stock products.
Have you used the Out-of-Stock Police app? If so, we'd love to hear about it in the comments box below!
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