AB Commerce: Out of Stock Email Alerts

Popular products will sell quickly and are in risk of going out of stock before you have had a chance to restock.

For such products you can offer your customers the option to sign up for an email alert so they are notified when that product is back in stock.

The email alert facility will also let you know what products your customers are interested in and what quantity of that product they want to purchase, use this information to guide your buying decisions. 

When the product is back in stock you have two options:

1. Manually trigger an email to each customer, you would use this approach if you want to control how many email alerts are sent or who the email alert is being sent to

2. The recommended approach is to allow a batch job run every 4 hours and automatically send an email to all customers who have signed up for an email alert for that product.  The email will say that the product is back in stock with a link directly into that product page.

The reason why we set the batch job to run every 4 hours is so that if, for example, you have a product that has 50 customers signed up for an email alert, and you get back in 30 in stock, the batch job will email the first 30 customers to allow them 4 hours to make a purchase, and after 4 hours, if there are still 15 left in stock, it will email out the next 15 customers - and so on.

Turning on the Out of Stock Email Alerts

To turn this on, just contact the Help Desk and they will:

• Turn on the ability for your customers to enter their email address for products that are out of stock
• Turn on the batch job that runs every 4 hours to see what products are back in stock and then email all customers who signed up for an email alert (the batch job will appear under Analytics - Your Batch Jobs when you log in)

Customers without an account

For customers that are not logged in, this is what they will see when they are viewing a product that is out of stock:

And when they click on Email me when back in stock, the following will pop up:

Customers with an account

When a customer is logged in, they wont be prompted for their email address as we already know their email address.  Also, they will see the following in their menu bar and the number in green will be highlighted when products come back into stock.

Viewing Email Alerts Signups

When logged in as web admin, click on Orders - Out of Stock Alerts to see all email alert sign-ups in the last 3 months.  They are sorted with the products with the highest potential revenue at the top of the list.

Sending Email Alerts

If you do not have the batch job turned on that automatically sends email alerts out every 4 hours, the Out of Stock Alerts screen above will have a textbox beside each product that is back in stock where you can enter the number of emails to send out and also a Send Emails button.  This will only show for products that are back in stock, and these will be beside the number of items that are now in stock so you can decide what portion of them you will send an email alert out for.  Pressing the Send Emails button will immediately send out the email alert to the number of customers you have entered.