The Best Way to Manage Out Of Stock Product in Shopify (5 Easy Tips)

I spent the last few days dong over 20 hours of research on the best ways to manage out of stock products on Shopify.

I read Shopify community discussions, countless blogs and watched hours of YouTube videos....

The main thing I learned, is A LOT of people manage their out-of-stock inventory terribly!

Here is the better way to do it.

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1. 99.9% of the time you should not hide or delete products once they are sold out. Each product page is a gold mine of SEO for your page and deleting them is worst than throwing away gold. If there are any links to that page anywhere on the internet, it will create 404 pages on your Shopify store and hurt your SEO rankings with Google. DO NOT DO IT.

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2. Instead of hiding or deleting sold-out products, there are a few ways to handle them.

1. If you never intend to sell the product again you should create a 301 redirect from that page to your home page or another product page. This will ensure you are not messing up the SEO you have worked so hard for on your store.
2. If you do intend to sell the product again:

2A. If the product is going to come back in stock soon add a presell button. Don't miss out on the potential revenue. This is also great for cash flow.

2B. If you're not sure when the product is going to come back in stock, collect email addresses. This way even though you may not feel right collecting revenue because you have no clue when you will be able to ship them their item, you can at least let them know when the item is back in stock.

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‍3. For both of these scenarios, push the sold-out items to the back of your collections. This will help your store look more presentable and at the same time ensure you are not wasting valuable selling space on items you don't have. (Shameless plug, this is what my app PushLast does.)

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4. For both of these scenarios, add-In Stock alternatives to the out-of-stock product pages. This will help you increase your purchase conversion rate on these pages. Many people don't care about getting the exact product listed but they do care about solving their problem now. This is where this comes in handy.

When it comes to running a Shopify business there are a lot of things to think about. If you don't have a lot of products that go out of stock often the then this is probably the least of your worries. That said, if you do have a lot of products that go out of stock often, I hope this helps you better manage that inventory.