Inventory Management Back in Stock
Report
Shopify
Want to know how your out of stock products compare, how they convert and more? We've got you covered
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From May 2020 to July 2023, Notify me! Back in stock alerts has been working with more than 20,000 Shopify stores to generate revenue from otherwise lost sales.
With the cost of inventory management for smaller eCommerce stores, it’s a rather big booster for revenue and a valuable future inventory forecasting tool.
Despite the challenging economic circumstances, more and more customers were more than happy to be in the waiting list of an out of stock product.
In this report, we dig into trends of products going out of stock, how they manage to get their inventory back on track and how they win back those customers with a fraction of the cost.
Over our 3 year tenure on Shopify, we analyzed over 20,000 merchants and here’s how it looks like.
Charts Overview
To take a deeper look into how your Shopify store(s) compares to others, we’ve put 2 filters on each chart:
Countries and Category (Vertical)
Keep in mind that if your country is not listed, It’s because there was no Shopify store from that country was using our app to create demand for its out of stock product.
Out of Stock Products Overview
Percentage of stores with out-of-stock products
Managing inventory is hard, making sure your products are all available for sale is a hard task, our app is the best solution to reduce the churn you get on those products.
Here’s a look at how many products run out of stock at Shopify stores.
Navigate to the chart and see the breakdown based on the store’s main product category and the number of products each store has out of stock, compared to all the products.
Percentage of products being out of stock
One key note to keep in mind is not all Shopify stores are created equal. Stores with 250+ products have a hard time maintaining a full inventory specially during busy periods like BFCM.
Here’s a quick look at the percentage of out of stock products compared to all products:
Restock Time!
Every out of stock product will come back to life one day sooner or later.
Analyzing more than 10+ Million restock notifications sent, here’s a deep look into how back in stock notifications look like on each channel
Back in stock requests and restock time
To restock a product, you need some time. By using Notify me!’s widget, this process becomes much more efficient and simple.
You can predict demand for future inventory data.
Here’s a chart about how long it takes for a Shopify store to restock a product and how the open rates and click rates of that product looks like after a time.
Fell free to play with the charts and laser focus on your veritical and country.
The result is what we would imagine looks like, if you restock a product fast in the first week of the request for that product, your chances of selling that in-stock item is much higher, this interest in product gradually decreases as time goes by.
Your chances of converting all your back in stock requests to sales massively drops after 60 days with click-rates dropping almost 50%! The open rates are still great, but the converison rate to order drops much more.
Our quick hint is that if your product is back, make sure to change your inventory number so the requests you’ve generated using our app, will convert the most!
This is one of the reasons why we decided to introduce the resend feature in our app too!
Now, if your in-stock product doesn’t convert well on first try, you can resend those notifications to massively increase conversion. Find how it works in this quick video here.
Back in stock requests and restocks done
Another interesting to look at is the percentage of restock requests fulfilled.
With millions of requests submitted for products, some stores do have the capacity to restock those items, some may not. This is attributed to a number of reasons, such as product becoming obsolete, no products being available and more.
In this chart you can see how much requests each store received for their out-of-stock product and how many of them were restocked (and sent the notifications automatically be Notify me)
More than 50% out-of-stock product gets restocked!
With order rates hitting around the 10% mark on some channels (Read until the end to see the full details) It’s important to see at your logisitcs and procurement to restock as much products as you can to increase sales.
Best Times to Restock
Best Days to restock a product
Restocking itself is a huge supply chain action, but making sure you get the most sales out of these restocks, is something Notify me! Is really focused on.
With an average open rate of 70%+, our restock notifications are a must-have for any Shopify store.
Here’s which day brings the most request for our stores and how much of those requests are restocked on that day
As anticipated, weekends have the least amount of restocks done by stores, but that doesn’t stop the requests coming in on the weekends as well.
This trend is a bit different for countries with different weekends (Middle-east countries have the least requests on Friday, a weekend in those countries), So make sure to choose your country before making assumptions.
Best hours to restock a product
Now to dig deeper into it, you need to keep in mind when to restock a product. Here’s a look at how many requests were generated and restocked on the timeframe.
Keep in mind that the times are all based on the countries local times, so filtering on countries is a must-do here:
If your store wants to stick to best practices, it’s recommended that you restock after 10 AM as the requests pile up. Many stores also forget that even though they may not be there to restock at night hours, there’s a huge demand at that time too specially at 8-10 PM time.
So make sure to pay a good attention to your evening and night visitors as they are the most active during that period.
Best Channels by data
Every out of stock product will come back to life one day sooner or later.
Analyzing more than 10+ Million restock notifications sent, here’s how each channel preformed
Conversion for each channel
Notify Me! uses 3 main channels of communication to notify your customers when a product is back in stock.
Here’s how the open rates and click rates look like for Email, SMS and Push Notifications:
Email has the highest usage and the highest Click rate. SMS is also an extremely cheap option (Starting from $0.03) and can have massive ROI for your back-in-stock campaign.
Our advice? All these channel bring something into the table and are a mean that shouldn’t be left behind. When setting up the app, make sure to activate all these channels to maximize your conversions.
Disclaimer: Our push notifications numbers are extracted from PushOwl’s API so it may have some disparities.
Back in Stock AOV
Here’s a chart we love, because it simply shows how back in stock notifications can boost your AOV.
In this chart based on category, you can see the numbers for the number of back in stock cart share and the whole shopping cart.
If this chart doesn’t make you enable your back in stock widget RIGHT NOW, we’re not sure what would.
When your customers are coming back for your product, they usually have items from before (abandoned cart) and are adding new products to their shopping cart that multiplies your AOV (Average Order Value)