In an e-commerce and dropshipping store, one problem that often happens is that your products still show on your store even if it is out of stock.
The result of this is bad customer experience. What if a customer really likes a product, only to realize that it is not available? Or worse, the customer orders it and pays for it, and then you have to give a refund because the product is no longer available.
The good news is that there is a new app in Shopify that can help you avoid this. It is called Out-of-Stock Police.
What is Out-of-Stock Police?
Out-of-Stock Police is an app that you can use after building your Shopify store. It keeps your store organized by pushing down out of stock products at the bottom of your collections pages.
The app does not remove products from your store, but they are placed at the bottom, so your customers get the best possible experience only.
That is the main feature of the app. However, there is another feature that allows you actually to hide the products from your store. What this means is that the option of hiding the out of stock product, or just pushing it down at the bottom of the collections page, is completely up to you.
How Does Out-of-Stock Police Work?
To make the product work, you have to install it in your Shopify store. The app is free to use, but it also has several packages that are paid.
Once it is installed, it will take records of your products. After it completes the sync, you have to go to your dashboard, and then program the app.
In the dashboard, you will be able to see your different collections. On each collection, you will be notified how many items are out of stock. There is a radio button to the right to help you control if the store would push the product down at the bottom of your collection page.
This dashboard also allows you to separate products that you want to be enabled or disabled. Disabled products will not show on your store. You can choose to enable or disable products as you want.
Out-of-Stock Police Features
What can this app do? Basically, there are two benefits to this product. The first one is that it saves you a lot of time. The second one is it provides better customer experience:
Here are the product features.
1. Push down out of stock items
You can program the app to push down out of stock products at the bottom of a collection page; this makes the product still visible to people and to search engines, but they are not seen immediately on your store.
2. Hide out of stock items
If you want, you can completely disable out of stock items so they will not show on your website at all. If you do this, that product page will not be indexed by Google.
Because of that, the app developers recommend that you simply push put of stock products down. This way, search engines will still index your product pages, but they will not be shown at the top of your collections page.
The downside to this is that a customer may click on that product page link, and find out that it is not available.
The trick here is to let this site visitor know that the product will be in stock soon. You can use other apps that can notify this customer once the time is back for sale.
3. Automate actions
You do not have to repeat the actions again and again. Once you have programmed an item to be pushed down or disabled, the app knows. If it is back on stock, then it will show up again if it goes out of stock again, then the app will take the necessary action.
4. Choose what products to push up
The app allows you to tag products and automate which products are shown first. You can program it to show products according to price, like from lowest to highest or the other way around.
You can also automatically push new products on top. Every time you upload something new, the app will push that product on top of the collections page.
You can set the number of days before the app decides that this product has to be pushed down because it is no longer new.
Out-of-Stock Police Pricing and Fees
The app has a free version, but this has some limitations. Read on and learn the different prices points and their features.
Free
- Automate the process of pushing down out of order products
- Hide out of stock products
- Customized sorting rules
- 24/7 support
- Product tagging
The free plan limits you to only 49 products and only up to 99 collection pages.
Silver – costs $4.99 per month
This plan has the same function as the free one, but you can tag and sort up to 499 products and a maximum of 99 collections.
Gold – costs $9.99 per month
Same features as the free one but your limit is increased to 4,999 products and 99 collections.
Platinum – costs $14.99 per month
Your limit is increased to 9,999 products and 99 collections. All features are the same as the free one.
Overall, all packages have the same functionality. The only difference is based on the number of products that you can tag.
Summary
This app is great if you are selling products that sell like pancakes, especially if you are dropshipping from AliExpress. You don’t want your customers to have a bad experience, and you certainly do not want to hem to leave.
This app pushes down your out of stock products so you can maximize your customer’s visit. They will first see the products that are in stock and are likely to buy these instead of the out of stock ones.
The product is great for shops that have huge inventories, as it saves you a lot of time from managing each stock manually.