Out-of-Stock Products Still for Sale

The order you cannot fill

A customer finds a product on your site, pays for it and gets a confirmation email. Two days later a second email arrives: sorry, it is sold out, and a refund is on its way.

Nothing about that order was the customer's fault. The website said the item was available because the number on the website was not the number on the shelf.

Most stores that sell both in person and online have run into this at least once. Some run into it every week without realising how often.

How the numbers drift apart

• Shop sales that never reach the online stock count.
• Stock tracking switched off for some products or all of them.
• Selling at zero allowed by a setting nobody chose deliberately.
• Breakage and samples taken off the shelf but not out of the system.
• A second channel, such as a marketplace, sharing the same stock.
• Wholesale orders filled from the retail shelves.

The third does its damage quietly. Most store platforms have one setting to track quantities and another to keep selling once the count reaches zero, and the second is sometimes switched on during setup and forgotten.

What a cancelled order costs

The refund itself is the smallest part. Some payment processors keep their fee even when you refund, and somebody has to write the apology and process the money back.

The larger cost is the customer. Someone who bought a gift for a date, or needed a part to finish a job, has lost days and now has to start again elsewhere.

They are unlikely to trust the stock on your site again, and some of them say so in a review.

One count, not two

The lasting fix is a single stock figure that every sale reduces, wherever it happens.

Many point-of-sale systems can share stock with an online store, so a bottle sold at the counter comes off the website at the same moment. If yours cannot, the gap has to be closed by routine.

That routine can be modest: a daily count of the twenty products that sell fastest, entered before the website's busiest hours, and a full count each month.

For fast sellers, add a buffer. Setting the website to stop selling at two or three left keeps the last units for the counter and absorbs the small errors every count contains.

A worked example

An olive oil and vinegar shop with a tasting room sells about forty oils and vinegars from its shelves and through its website.

The online store was loaded with stock counts on launch day. After that the till and the website were never connected, and nobody adjusted the website when bottles sold over the counter.

Through the spring the online figures drifted further from the shelves. A single-estate oil from a harvest that arrives once a year sold out in the shop during a busy fortnight, while the website kept taking orders for it.

Every one of those orders ended in an apology and a refund, and the oil would not be back for months.

The shop moved to a point-of-sale system that shares one stock count with the online store, and set the website to stop selling each item with two bottles left.

On sold-out oils, the buy button gave way to the month the next harvest is expected and a form to be emailed when it arrives.

The waiting list for that one oil also told the owner how much to order next time.

Saying what is available

Availability belongs on the product page, next to the price, before anyone reaches the checkout.

Use plain labels that mean what they say: in stock, only a few left, out of stock with an expected date, or made to order with a shipping time.

Only say a few are left when it is true. A permanent "only two left" is noticed quickly, and it makes every other claim on the page harder to believe.

If a date is a guess, give a rough time, such as early September, rather than a day you cannot promise.

Back-in-stock notices

A notice form turns a dead end into a reason to come back.

Keep the promise narrow. The customer asked to hear about one product, so send one email when it returns, and do not add them to the newsletter unless they ticked that box too.

Send it promptly, while stock lasts, with a direct link to the product rather than the home page. The list of names waiting is also a measure of demand, showing what to reorder first.

Hide, or keep the page

Deleting a sold-out product's page loses whatever search ranking and links it had built, and anyone following an old link lands on an error.

If the product is coming back, keep the page live with its availability stated, and move sold-out items to the end of category pages so browsing stays pleasant.

If it is gone for good, say so on the page and point to the closest alternative.

When an order slips through

Even with good counts, an order will occasionally arrive for something that sold minutes earlier.

Contact the customer the same day, in a personal email or by phone, and offer a choice: wait for the restock, take a similar product, or a full refund.

Some will happily wait when asked. An automatic cancellation never gives them the chance.

The counter-case

Some stores have less to fix.

A shop that sells only online, from one storeroom, with a few dozen products, can keep accurate counts by hand. One-off items such as vintage pieces sell once and disappear automatically.

And a store whose supplier restocks within days can reasonably keep selling at zero, provided the product page says plainly that the item ships later and roughly when.

Everyone else needs one stock count that every sale reduces, and honest labels for whatever has run out.

The stock check

1. Check the stock settings on every product.
2. Find the setting that allows selling at zero.
3. Compare the website with the shelf for your top sellers.
4. Connect the till and the store, or set a routine.
5. Set a buffer for fast sellers.
6. Add availability labels beside the price.
7. Offer back-in-stock notices on sold-out items.

Step three takes half an hour and shows whether there is a problem at all. If the website and the shelf disagree on several of your top twenty products, the rest of the list is worth doing this month.

Planning stock and deadlines around a busy date is covered in Mother's Day orders and the cut-off date.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.