How’s Your Availability?

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by Paul Boisvert

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Monday, November 19th, 2007

A merchant recently asked about how to insert a custom message between the item price and the add to cart button that would show the availability of the item. With this merchant, he was putting up items in his store for collectible die-cast cars that were not released yet. It makes sense for this merchant to provide notice to his shoppers of new products that will be released shortly—especially with regards to collectibles, though I’d imagine there are other vertical markets where this is true.

So not only does it make sense to do this to capture interest with prospective buyers, but it also makes sense to do this for all stores in terms of setting expectations with customers. I read in a recent white paper about shoppers expectations that seventy-two percent would be less willing to shop with a retailer when sales items are out of stock. That’s a big number and it goes beyond just being able to keep items in stock. Merchants need to set expectations about order fulfillment times in addition to shipping delivery times—especially with the holidays fast approaching. The last thing you want is a customer to buy an item expecting a pre-holiday delivery which you can’t meet because you didn’t specify the item will not be in stock for 8 weeks.

The good thing is the Store Editor templates already include a feature that serves this function—the Availability field. The Availability field for 3.0 Editor templates appears below the price but above the add to cart button—right where shoppers can see it.

Availability field appears in red text with a standard option.

The Availability field can be set in the Variables page with a global variable that applies to all pages (your standard product availability). You can then set this on a per page basis using the Availability field on individual pages. However, for this particular merchant, he wanted to have a value appearing there which wasn’t in the standard list of values. He wanted to notify shoppers of the estimated release date for the item. Database Upload to the rescue.

You can set custom values for Availability on a per product basis in the following way.

1. Make a note of the product IDs for which you wish to set a custom availability. Merchants can download their product database from Catalog Manager to set this for many products.
2. Create a spreadsheet with two columns: ID and Availability (or delete all columns except for ID and add Availability if using your product database from Catalog Manager).
3. Enter text in the availability column which you wish to appear on the product such as “Item is on backorder” or “Estimated release date January 2008″.
4. Save the file as .CSV format with the name data.csv.
5. Upload to the Store Editor using the database upload feature and click the Add button when uploaded. Note: Do not add this file as a Rebuild. This will wipe out your store contents except for the items and information in the spreadsheet. You can use the Revert feature if you make a mistake and Rebuild your store.
6. Publish your changes when ready.

Availability field with custom availability message.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

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