Several e-commerce websites are running successfully, but some of them are still wondering on how to handle out-of-stock products, which is an important part for an ecommerce website. The mishandling of the situation may damage the SEO strategy of the website, and will impact negatively the customer experience.

Look at some of the methods you can adapt to handle the situation,

  • Temporarily not available

The page should remain online and if it has structured data the review history will be displayed well on the Google search results. Sometimes it is usual for some products to be out-of-stock which will be restocked within a few weeks. You should notify the customers, there can be related products and email capture for informing them when the product is restocked, which is even done for the seasonal products.

  • Waitlist

If the product is not available currently, some of the e-commerce stores use this method to not lose their search rankings. Waitlist is created when there is demand for the sold-out product, this is a queue where interested people can save them for later. Here adding the product to the waitlist is to make them available for the user when it is in stock. The product may be of less quantity and will be available within a time, this can be followed by the website manager.

  • Extra links

There may be backlinks from other blogs/websites, if this is the scenario make sure that the link is directed to one of the similar products on your website when you want to use a 301 redirect. Avoid linking everything to the homepage as there is a chance for them to lose the link equity and be classified as a soft 404 error.

  • Sufficient traffic without links

In this situation, you may not be wanting to lose the valuable traffic that your website has in most cases. You have got options to either 301 redirect the users to another page on the website or you can leave it thereafter by ensuring that there are useful links of related pages on the product page. You can look into the page conversion to decide what to do among the options.

If the product pages are not converting, set up a 301 redirect so that it can open a similar product page and inform the customer about the out-of-stock issue of the product they have chosen. You are lucky if the product page is converting, it can be used as they can optimize your conversions, the user can be redirected to other relevant products or category pages.

  • Without traffic and links

Here it is better that you delete the page as there is no SEO Services benefit in keeping this product page. You should have a useful 404 error page in place and for removing from the index you should submit the URLs to Google Search Console.

  • Proper instructions

Customer experience is something that will help you to boost your business, make sure that you give them a clear idea about the out-of-stock situation of the product, and when it is restocked. The product pages should be well designed for offering the users variants of a single product. Try to give advance alerts for the customers when they are looking for a product if it has low stock, this helps them to get the product quickly if they require the item

Conclusion

Managing out of stock products is an important part of the e-commerce business, so it has to be considered carefully. It plays a very important part in great customer experience. So you can either do it yourself or Hire SEO Consultant from Calgary to do it for you.