Have you ever been disappointed when finding out the product you were looking for hours in the online shops is out of stock? For eCommerce, it’s a way of losing revenue. 
Approximately 50% of customers who visit your shop are searching for specific products. That’s, by keeping products in stock you can capitalize on those visiting your shop at the moment. However, if there are products that are constantly out of stock, you can face a big dip in potential sales. From this particular article, you can find out what causes stockouts and keep monitoring them.
What Is a Stockout and Why It Is Caused?
A stockout is a product that is unavailable to be bought. It leads to a loss in sales. This is especially detrimental to a business if you don’t indicate when the product will be in stock. The first that can lead to stockouts is that you can underestimate customers’ demand. The other one is the supplier delays and the last one is the lack of funds to purchase new inventory.
However, there are times when you are just not able to control the stockouts e.g. production delays, delivery issues, unpaid invoices, or just human errors. In such cases, you’ll have to find a way out – you can decide on a different supplier or find a way to supply chain management.
How a Stockout Affects your Business?
Stockout is a quite dangerous thing that can happen to your business and you should avoid it. You have to understand that the stockouts significantly impact customers’ experience and that you can lose trust. Ultimately, it leads to a loss in revenue and can potentially damage your brand’s reputation.
Do you know what does it cost to attract only one single customer to your shop? If there are out-of-stock products in the shop, you’ll face a drop in conversion because there is nothing to buy and the customer most probably will buy the goods from your competitors.
What’s even more after such a shop experience it’s unlikely that a customer gets back you your shop. Even if you create a newsletter that will notify the customers about the in-stock goods, this doesn’t guarantee a sales conversion in the future. Don’t forget about negative reviews that unsatisfied customers can leave if they don’t find the desired products in the shop. Potential customers can see these reviews and may perceive your brand as unreliable.
How to Prevent Stockouts for your eCommerce Business
Customers can look up alternatives in a matter of seconds if your products aren’t readily available. You can not only lose sales and decrease your average order value, but you may also lose potential. To avoid stockouts from impacting the success of your business, here is what you can do.
Calculate your safety stock as the excess product you keep on hand in case of an emergency or retail supply chain failure that causes a drop in inventory level safety stock. Planning for demand can be tough, but it’s not impossible. You can use historical purchasing data to predict future sales trends thus avoiding stockouts.
If you are using the Product Table plugin you can use such useful columns as Stock Status to control the product stock status. If any of the products are out of stock the column will automatically hide them from the list so you can have time to bring them to the shop. To do this, the plugin provides the Hide out of stock items option.
Go to Settings-> Features and enable the option if you do not want to display products that are not in stock in the store in the table.
From our detailed guide, you can learn how to work with the column and set it up according to your needs.
Final Thoughts
So if you are running an online business, preventing stockouts products should be your high priority. The best thing you can do is to focus on optimizing your supply chain and with the help of such useful plugins as Product Table, keep your out-of-stock items hidden from the customers to avoid a bad user experience.