One of the most frustrating experiences in commerce is to have unmet consumer demand. The most common reasons for an out of stock is unplanned success of the product – perhaps a campaign was more effective than anticipated or there was a celebrity siting with the product or maybe there was just a much better product market fit than anticipated. Once this happens you have to decide if you will buy/manufacture additional inventory. In order to decide if and how much you should order, you need to know what your current demand looks like. The easies way to capture this demand is with a “notify me” feature on the product details page (PDP)…or is it? It’s a great solution but there are a host of operational and technical challenges to providing a quality experience for out of stock and backordered products.

Managing Internal Inventory Picture

At the heart of successful product restocking notifications is a reliance on your internal inventory picture. In e-commerce, where stock levels can fluctuate rapidly (even more so in omnichannel), it’s important to have a real-time view of your inventory. Integration with reliable real time inventory management systems is key to achieving this. To scale the experience across any meaningful number of products or categories you’ll need a triggered notification between your inventory system, your email system, and where ever you are storing the “notify me” demand. Once product is in fact back in stock (either physically or ATP), it’ll need to trigger an operation to execute the notifications.

Questions:

• How will the OMS know it needs to send an inventory notification to the email platform? Or…
• Will the e-commerce engine manage excess demand tracking as part of its regular inventory feed?
• Once inventory is available how will the customer communication be sent?

Working with Buyers/Planners on Reorders

Efficiently replenishing your stock involves close collaboration between your e-commerce team and buyers/planners. Buyers and planners play a pivotal role in ensuring that reorders are placed in a timely manner. The challenge here lies in balancing lead times with demand. Ordering too early might lead to excess inventory, while ordering too late risks stock outs. The best buyers balance analytics and intuition.

Questions:

• How do you manage demand forecasting?
• Do you think excess demand on a product will persist? Will you be able to convert these same customers in a months time? Two months? Three?

Managing the “Notify Me” List

Assuming you want to capture the demand you need to figure out how you’ll manage the “notify me” list. This list is simply customers who have expressed interest in a given product that is currently unavailable. Managing this list is largely a technical issue but is part and parcel with the notification strategy below.

Questions:

• Will you always capture the demand across all products or is this a strategic tool? In other words, will you enable this feature if you have no intention of re-ordering a particular product?
• What information needs to be captured within the list? This will help determine your technical requirement and inform where it gets stored.
• How will you store the captured data? Does your e-commerce platform have internal database capabilities? Many platforms don’t. Could you create a customer segment for each product with demand inside your email platform?
• How much custom logic is needed to manage the list within those platforms?
• Is demand at the product parent or SKU level?

Notification Strategy

Determining how many customers to notify relative to the available inventory is another challenging aspect. Notify too few, and you risk underutilizing your inventory. Notify too many, and you may find yourself unable to fulfill the demand, leading to customer dissatisfaction. Striking the right balance is a delicate art that involves analyzing product velocity, overall demand, return rates, and your risk tolerance.

Questions:

• Will you manage all product notifications the same?
• Will you notify the entire list a product is back in stock? Or only the number of people equal to the inventory? Or some advanced calculation factoring demand and inventory together?
• Will consumers be removed from the list after notification or only if they open the email?
• Can consumers be on the list more than once?
• Will your notification strategy apply for single units (returns) the same as a full inventory run?

Customer Communication After Notification

Notifying a customer when a product is back in stock is just the beginning. What happens when a customer receives that coveted notification but doesn’t make a purchase immediately? This is where a well-thought-out customer communication strategy comes into play. Implementing follow-up communication, such as reminder emails or exclusive offers, can help maintain customer engagement and increase the chances of conversion.

The technical complexity of notifying customers when products are back in stock is non-trivial. It’s a challenge that requires a deep understanding of commerce technology, inventory management, and your customers behavior but opens up a new frontiers of value realization by capturing existing demand that would have otherwise gone unmet.