Customers believe the item is sold out after they made the purchase, and then cancel

Customers believe the item is sold out after they made the purchase, and then cancel

Book-seller
Visitor
1 0 0

We have an absurd problem with our Shopify-site. We sell books with our own inventory and storage. Sometimes a client buys the last book in stock, and for some reason they believe that the book is sold out after they have made the purchase. They do not manage to tell me exactly how they get this information that the book is sold out. I believe they go back to the product page and see the Add to cart-button which now says "Sold out" or come to some landing page on Shopify that says that the book is now sold out. However the consequence is usually that they buy the book somewhere else before they notify us, and then ask us to cancel their order.

 

Can someone please tell me what I can do to not make them know that we have the item they just purchased? 

 

Thanks a lot.

 

 

Reply 1 (1)

JayAdra
Shopify Partner
166 14 41

A lot of themes have the option to show stock numbers when it gets to a certain threshold. I wonder if it would help to show "1 left in stock" message on the product page, and then when they purchase, it'll say "out of stock" but should be clearer that they got the last one?

 

Alternatively, and this is a bit of a backwards way of going about it, but you could continue to sell the books as backorders when they run out of stock? So they'll never show as "sold out", and you get the added benefit of making continued sales (assuming you can order in those books from suppliers to fulfil the backorders).

 

We've worked with an Aussie bookstore recently who set up backorders using our app for a similar situation, and displays information about the extended shipment time on the product pages. They make a few thousand extra by continuing to sell these out of stock books, and special ordering them in as orders are placed. Might be worth considering as it should help your initial problem too.