Real-life product management strategy for fast-moving inventory challenges
Imagine this: it starts off as an ordinary day. You’re sipping your mint tea and answering Slack messages. A new notification pops up in your team channel. It’s from the customer service team:
“Urgent attention! Customers are saying we sent them an email saying the product is back in stock. They clicked the link in the email, but it wasn’t working properly. They couldn’t buy the product.”
Of course, as a product manager, your first thought is: “Ah, the link is probably broken.” But after asking a colleague to dig a little deeper — and some back-and-forth later — you find out the “broken link” isn’t actually broken. The customer meant that when they reached the product page, there was no Add to Cart button.
As the product manager for the Shop, you quickly realise what really happened:
The customer clicked on the back-in-stock email, but by the time they opened it and reached the product page, the stock had already sold out. Ouch.
The Problem: Why Ecommerce Product Recommendations Matter
- Fast-changing inventory.
- Purchases are difficult to forecast because customers can buy through multiple platforms.
Without strong ecommerce product recommendations in place, a stockout can instantly turn into a lost sale and a disappointed customer.
The Options We Explored
You switch into full Product Manager mode: “How can we improve this experience for the customer?”
You could:
- Keep things as they are
- Change the calculation so fewer customers get the email
- Show them an identical product
1. Keep it as it is
The risk of doing nothing? Customers stop trusting your back-in-stock emails, leading to:
- Lower email open rates
- Fewer stock reminder subscriptions
- More unsold warehouse inventory
- Lost revenue
2. Send fewer emails
You could tweak the formula that determines who gets notified.
I started looking into this — even asked our developers — but nobody knew off-hand, since the feature was implemented years ago by a different team. Thankfully, the original dev team had documented it. Turns out, the formula was already strong. Lowering the threshold risked cutting traffic and revenue.
3. Present identical products (Our Winning Ecommerce Product Recommendation Strategy)
This is the option we chose — and it worked.
Within two days of launch, we saw a measurable revenue increase. These ecommerce product recommendations even outperformed some of our existing recommendation slots.
How We Did It
The “secret” to the 30% increase in ecommerce product recommendations revenue?
a) Understand the customer’s problem
The easiest fix would have been to make it clearer on the page when an item is out of stock — and we did make that improvement. It reduced customer service complaints, but it still wouldn’t have solved the deeper issue: disappointment.
b) Delight the customer
We can’t always solve the exact problem, but that’s no excuse not to delight the customer.
We offered near-identical products — same colour, similar shape, or same brand. This gave customers a real alternative they could still get excited about.
Conclusion: From Lost Sales to Loyal Customers
When faced with an “out of stock” issue, don’t just fix the surface problem. Look for ways to turn frustration into delight — and in ecommerce, strategic product recommendations can be the difference between losing a sale and increasing your revenue by 30%.
