How do you encourage non-stock item sales?

AbleMods · Post by **AbleMods** » Tue Jan 29, 2008 7:03 am

I'm receiving an increasing number of inquiries regarding when an item with zero-quantity will be available i.e. in-stock again.

My distributor isn't going to shelf-stock every single item, so some items are "non stock" but always available.

How do I encourage visitors to make their purchase with this scenario?

I was thinking about changing the backorder message to something like "Non-stock item, 5-7 days turnaround".

Or perhaps turning inventory tracking off for those items.

Thoughts?

compunerdy · Post by **compunerdy** » Tue Jan 29, 2008 8:51 am

"Usually ships within 5-7 days"

AbleMods · Post by **AbleMods** » Tue Jan 29, 2008 3:42 pm

that's a good idea. Done.

Smurf · Post by **Smurf** » Wed Jan 30, 2008 6:44 pm

This is one reason the custom availability message per SKU is so important.

We run into the same problem. Our main suppliers are nearby and we get many of our non-stock products within 24 hours. This allows for a "usually ships in 2-3 business days". If the supplier is further away we adjust accordingly. We always use business days. A few customers will count weekends anyway, but at least we try to make this clear.

I try to be careful with this. Sales of non-stock items are consistently our biggest problem.

What I am hoping to do when we make the final move to AC7 is to pull PO dates, and average delivery times and push this to AC7 to use as estimates.

I also see more sites starting to put extended availability info such as,

"PRODUCT will be shipping from SUPPLIER again in February, but they don't have quite enough yet to completely cover backorders.
We'll be taking care of as many customer orders as quickly as we can, so please make sure to place your order as early as possible.
"

AbleMods · Post by **AbleMods** » Wed Jan 30, 2008 6:50 pm

Availability per SKU would be good for a smaller store, but mine has over 20,000 items. That's not going to work on my scale.

What would be sweet would be custom availability messages per warehouse or per vendor. Now that's something that work well for me. My product availability really is based at the vendor level.

As I think about it, the programming wouldn't be all that difficult. Modify the vendor page to include a field for Custom Availability Message. Link it by VendorId into the Products table. Then modify the productprice.ascx control to query the new table for the message, using the store default if a custom message isn't found.

Hmmm might make an interesting mod project - I may have to dive into that one.