One of the biggest lost opportunities in eCommerce is out of Stock Products. Not only for SEO but you also lose a customer if you don’t take advantage of these product pages. When you are out of stock, not only will your competitors raise their prices to make more margin but you’ll be losing out on this first purchase and your customers lifetime value if you don’t optimize these out of stock product pages.
Hammock Town does a great job by asking the customer for their email if they want to be notified when a product is back in stock.
Google Gives Advice on Handling Out Of Stock eCommerce Products
How often do you try to buy something online only to realize the product is out of stuck. No only is it frustrating to the consumer causing bad experience but it’s also harmful for SEO.
Matt Cutts gives great advice for eCommerce store owners in this video. He explains what you should do with products pages that are no longer available.
What do I do if my eCommerce products aren’t available anymore?
- Small eCommerce stores with 10-30 Products should suggested related products to the customers
- Average eCommerce sites with hundreds of thousands of product pages should do a 404, unless it’s coming back in stock
- Larger eTail sites, should use the meta tag “unavailable after” to tell Google that after a certain date it won’t be useful to users.
Do you know any other stores that have unique out of stock product detail pages? If so share them in the comment and we’ll add them to the post!
