Out of stock items

[Comfortzone]

AIBU to say to online retailers, please please please, if your product is OUT OF STOCK, just simply remove it from the webpage!

Especially Next and Boots...

Anyone else find this very frustrating? Or maybe I'm just turning into a grumpy old lady

Oh yes. It's very annoying for them to advertise something only to find it is out of stock. I can't wait for the shops to open so I can see the thing in front of me.

TU Sainsburys is terrible for this.

I like the way you have the option of hiding out of stock on John Lewis website. I can't order from Boots anymore as it drives me mad and wastes so much time.

The thing is products will constantly be arriving and unpacked at the warehouses and distribution centres daily. Sometimes several times a day. By the time something had been removed from the website it will probably be back in stock again. The turnover of products can be unbelievably fast for many items.

Hobbycraft are winding me up with this every day at the moment. There is constantly an advert on my FB feed for a 'paint your own' wooden rainbow that my children would love but in the last month it has been continuously out of stock! So stop advertising it!!

Yanbu. It drives me mad!

Yep, I hate that! Also, with being on the larger side right now (damn you lockdown weight and lack of willpower!!) I find that all of the 16's and XL's are the first to go and never seem to be back in stock. I really miss clothes shopping for the basics and wonder how things will be when the shops open as most of the high street clothes shops will be gone I hate having to do all of my clothes shopping online!

@Ilovemaisie

The thing is products will constantly be arriving and unpacked at the warehouses and distribution centres daily. Sometimes several times a day. By the time something had been removed from the website it will probably be back in stock again. The turnover of products can be unbelievably fast for many items.

But if they've got the ability to put a field on the product page saying "Out of stock" then they've also got the ability to filter those products out of search results, then once restocked have them automatically appear again.

Which means it's a conscious choice at some point to leave out of stock items visible.

I was trying to buy a tin for baking. It was quite an unusual tin because it could be made into a range of different sizes. The website let me go as far as adding it to my basket and clicking check out before telling me it was out of stock so I couldn’t. I went back to the product page and it definitely didn’t say out of stock anywhere on there.

Glad I'm not the only one.

I actually go to a different retailer if I find it happening too often on a website. I'd happily work remotely for companies updating their websites daily if they paid me to do it.

Out of stock items don't seem to be updating daily or weekly in line with times of the new stock arriving etc so there is definitely incompetence somewhere: Maybe they get paid for clicks on items regardless on whether it is actually in stock or not?

Also, Next sale items are ALWAYS out of stock in all sizes, so why bother keeping the listing on view?

I would have thought retailers would have sharpened up their game and especially their stock supply updates when the entire country is relying on them for shopping.

It's literally putting me off choosing certain retailers because I don't have the time or patience to keep searching for in stock items!

YANBU.

It's such a timewaster.

@DDiva

TU Sainsburys is terrible for this.

100% agree!

I find it to be a very common way for companies to advertise fantastic sales - but when you go look online the best deals are all out of stock. Now, this could be because everyone has snapped up the great deal but as a cynic, I think its very likely these great deals only ever had a handful of stock and they just mark down the pricing on these particular items to boost footfall online. Ergo, bit of a scam.

Boots drives me nuts! I was looking for clothes for DD and filtered by her size but tons of out of stock items were still popping up. After 20 minutes I gave up and looked elsewhere.

Yes. I can't find the sports bra i buy in my size anywhere. I click on it, then it's all the 30As. Maybe if I wanted a black one, but I don't. I like a colourful bra underneath my largely black or grey sports clothes.

@redheadwitch I agree - it's a very old dated marketing trick to either inflate the original rrp against the sale price to make it look more appealing as a bargain, or to label stock as out of stock to try and keep the customer checking back for the item in a few days

They need to up their game. We're not stupid and especially during COVID we have less patience for being taken as consumer mugs so to speak.

We want an abundance of in stock items only and clear, simple online purchase experiences.

We don't need to know if your stock is so great that it's selling so fast to be suddenly and constantly out of stock when really you lot just can't be bothered to update your websites!

And shops making jumpers look lovely, but they're actually a bit cropped and square.
Asos and h&m, I'm looking at you. What's the point of a cropped warm jumper? Even slightly?I buy jumpers to keep warm. I like to be able to move my arms without them exposing my stomach.

Medusa I don't know how the technical side of running a website works so I can't really say how easy or not it is too remove something from the site.
I know some retailers though it will depend where you live. A product can be on the website and sold out in Distribution Centre A but still in stock in B. If you live in the area covered by A it will show up as out of stock and not available for delivery, if you live in area B you can order it.
Even when you go into a physical shop though if things are out of stock but it will still be showing as a product they sell by the Shelf Price Ticket. What's the difference?

@themoth Agree! Cropped jumper model is usually sitting on the floor looking miserable against a wall to obviously hide the fact that the jumper is actually above her belly button.

But we won't tell the consumer this info, because we are, you know, in the fashunnn industry and it's not our job to give facts, only VISUALS

M&S is the WORST out of them all. Try looking for, say, a bra in your size, then you'll find that none of them are actually in stock in the size. Utterly useless and I tell them this on every survey I can.

Dunelm awful too. Trying to buy curtains is a nightmare!

@ilovemaisie Ingrt your point - in Sainsbury's stores if a product isn't in stock, the shelf is empty. But online should be automatically updated shouldn't it?

Surely if John Lewis can add a button saying 'hide out of stock items' then other retailers can do it. I've built websites in the past and it's a matter of logging in and adjusting a couple of preferences. How this works on national level though could be tricky, but again if John Lewis have the in stock function, then it can't be so difficult really

I bought something on ebay costing £120 promising 2-day delivery. I needed the item urgently. After a week I complained to the seller that it had not turned up. That's when he told me it should never have been listed -- they had been out of stock for a while. They are a fairly big company with 40,000 feedback in a half a dozen years. Anyway, they offered me a refund so I accepted it and bought the item from another seller.

A week later the item from the first seller arrived! They have not contacted me or asked me to pay, so I guess their warehousing and accounting is such a shambles that they don't even know I've got it!

this is all systems issues. Most large store systems are amalgamations or just plain old or have been patched and now don't make sense

Comfortzone unfortunately I can only go by my knowledge of 2 decades of retail work in a physical store. I know nothing about the IT side of it.