Question: We have many brands on our site and inventory is an ever fluctuating beast. With new management in place, they want the product to go away when out of stock as they feel it is cluttering our websites too much. However, this is causing logistical issues as the right people aren’t always getting the “back in inventory” messaging in a timely fashion, so wines are sitting there and not selling because they aren’t visible on the website (until we manually turn them back on).
Historically, we’ve been using the “Don’t Sell and Display Message” option in the “Out of Stock Option” menu in the “Manage Skus” part of our product. We haven’t touched the “Deactivate Product” option yet, so I’m curious about it.
When using the “Deactivate Product” option here, is this set up so that it ONLY deactivates the product when the product is at zero, or does it deactivate it permanently? In other words, once the product gets inventory back into it, does the product auto-reactivate, or does the user have to reactivate it themselves?
@brianking - If a product deactivates, it will remain deactivated even if inventory is added back. You would need to reactivate the SKU when you’d like to sell it again.
From both an SEO and consumer perspective, you really want old products (even if they are out of inventory) visible online. That way links from blogs, social media, emails, the label, etc. still work.
Follow up… Brian Teaff thought there once was a “Hide from Website” option within that drop-down menu for when a product reaches zero where it would indeed disappear but then reappear once the inventory came back… was that once there and is no longer there or was he mis-remembering things (a total possibility)?
Also (not to be taken the wrong way), but nope… we don’t want old products active. We have something like 1100 products in the system with about 200 active products. We actually have a separate website that stores all media and collateral for all products, including past vintages that we can direct them towards for that.
If there’s a way that the system is able to sort by active products by default so that inactive products only appear AFTER all active product are listed, please let me know and I can at least start with that.
I’m probably not quite seeing what you are asking but you could do a product export and sort on IsActive. If you had a bunch of products to reactive you could isolate those in this export, set IsActive to 1, and upload. At least you aren’t doing this one at a time then.
Still not seeing the utility of a whole separate website for past vintages, I just remove them from active categories and move them to a Library category. Poof, you don’t see them unless you know they are there. Anyone who reviewed that old vintage still has a link to it. And it provides the opportunity for the customer to find their way to the most recent vintage.
I have a website that has 90 products on it… 25 of them are inactive products (including those that are temporarily out of stock but will return) are mixed randomly amongst the active product. What I’m suggesting is that inactive product only begin AFTER all active products are listed.
In terms of library wines… that’s a call that’s WAAAAYYYY above my personal pay scale here. Remember that we have over 50 brands within our portfolio, which is a major reason why all marketing collateral for both current and library vintages on wines is located in one central space (http://www.ffwsales.com/documents) although yes, tech sheets ARE connected to anything listed on the brand sites themselves. As I handle all email inquiries for all brand websites, I’d say that of the 1000s of emails that I’ve addressed in the past two years, maybe 20 of them were in regards to not being able to find information on a library wine on the actual brand website (and of those 20, I’d say 15 of them were of the “I’ve got a bottle of 1968 Sebastiani Chardonnay… what’s it worth and can you send me the tasting notes” variety).
To demonstrate this in terms of the new Director who has initiated all of this, imagine you went to look for a new digital camera on Amazon and your result looked like this (See screenshot)… He believes that, from a consumer’s perspective, it looks cluttered and that we’re not maintaining our website.
Also, the customer can choose their “Sort By” options (A-Z, Low to High, etc), so what I’m referring to in regards of listings is two-fold…
Once a product reaches 0 inventory, we’d like the system to be able to hide the product from the webpage but also be smart enough to know that once inventory syncs back to that product when more arrives at our fulfillment center that it automatically turns it back on (eliminating any human error element).
If that’s not possible, then to have inactive products appear at the very end regardless of the “Sort By” criteria. In this link (http://www.foleyfoodandwinesociety.com/Shop-the-Exchange) there are 33 pages of wines available… if there’s a total of four pages worth of out-of-stock wines amongst this, we’d rather have them listed at the end than interspersed throughout the pages and again, regardless of the “Sort By” criteria or whatever the default listings might be.
Here we go:
If you are a vin65 and Wine Direct customer, then the following tools become available:
-Out of Stock Replenishment IN Request auto-creation. Each day, your wines that ran out the prior day are reported in a notification and you can choose to add them to an IN request with one click.
-If IN Request is type “Replenish”, then it can address the following when an inventory sync turns a 0 to a positive number: Is it active? Is it ‘display on website’? If backordered, do xyz, etc.
