4 ms·

I used to work for major US ecommerce site that catered to a more, wizened, population due to previous reputation and longevity in the brick and mortar realm. W

by nkrisc 7y ago

I used to work for major US ecommerce site that catered to a more, wizened, population due to previous reputation and longevity in the brick and mortar realm. We would get feedback all the time about the fact that out of stock items were shown on the site. Their expectation of a website was like a physical store: that if it was out of stock, they shouldn't be able to see it there at all. If they saw an item in the search results, they assumed that meant it had to be in stock, or it wouldn't be able to show up on the website. When they clicked the product page and then found out it was out of stock, they were super pissed. It was a completely different mental model driven by a lifetime of shopping in brick and mortar stores and a fundamental misunderstanding of how websites and databases work, which is of course not really their problem nor concern. For some folks showing out of stock items is a degradation of the experience, for others it's an improvement. Know your audience, or at least pick one to target.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
... or just have a prominent switch on your search result page. [ ] Show out-of-stock items. Unchecked by default, to cater for majority use case.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  It's that simple! Why didn't we think of that!? Of course that existed. It didn't matter because the initial state did not meet their mental model of how it worked. We probably could have made it the biggest thing on the page and they still would have ignored it because they were not looking for it. For unrelated reasons we were not hiding out of stock items by default. Wasn't my call.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > It's that simple! Why didn't we think of that!? Many did. I fail to see what's difficult here. You can simultaneously achieve the following: - Provide aforementioned filtering switch. - Sort in-stock results first, or split the results into two groups (in/out stock). - Mark the out-of-stock results clearly on the search result page, e.g. by overlaying a big "OUT OF STOCK" label on top of the item picture. At the risk of sounding smug, I think all this requires is thinking about what your users need to make a decision that's in their best interest. The "clicked the product page and then found out it was out of stock" should never, ever happen; that information needs to be available on the search results page. EDIT: From your edit I understand that the problem boiled down to these items being shown by default, which was unexpected by the audience. That's truly the kind of issue that may become apparent only after deploying and getting feedback from people. That said, were the out-of-stock items clearly marked on the results page? Personally, I'd be super-pissed if they weren't.
    - nkrisc 7y ago
      Everything was there, they didn't believe it I suppose. They had a very rigid expectation that didn't mesh with otherwise common e-commerce practices. They believed that of an item was shown on the results page, it had to be in stock. As if there was a pressure sensitive pad on the warehouse shelves where the item goes to determine if it shows up in the results or not. We could have designed for this audience, but at the expense of more numerous, savvy users. Believe me, we had many very smart people working there, we had a good handle on the situation. There's plenty I left out here to make a point regarding out of stock items and certain expectations regarding them.
      - no-s 7y ago
        >>We could have designed for this audience, but at the expense of more numerous, savvy users. Of course, that could be interpreted as snide. Very snide. Pardon me, I feel I must respond from a perhaps cynical perspective, but in the spirit of HN, this should not be interpreted as a personal attack, please consider it as a form of customer feedback resulting from real-world experience...: Lets imagine your unsophisticated user wants to buy something. Your team has made sure the desired product is splashed on all the relevant search results with vim and vigor, nay, it hunts them down with delightfully appealing charm. Then the not-so-savvy target follows the trail, most assuredly identifying themselves as an eager customer, providing all sorts of delightful self-identifying information so that future marketing will surely be able to follow up with grander offerings specifically targeted to their needs! Sadly, the little "in-stock only[ ]" checkbox was ancillary to the much more important (as determined by high-quality tests run by the best consulting firms or maybe just lower-cost magical thinking) page features like "buy this immediately" button and "most popular choice" banner. Thus the user guided by top-notch design immediately launched into the purchase process and enters payment and shipping information as prompted, then clicks the final checkout button only to be informed by pop-up the item is out of stock! To add insult to injury your site actually authorizes the payment and says the item is backordered and thus delivery may be delayed N+1 weeks, where N is the limit of what any reasonable person would expect and WTF didn't it tell them before it went down this rathole. At which point my spouse/parent/adult child comes to me and asks me why they found this thing to buy but they can't seem to get it...to which I reply, this is a scam, cancel payment if you made it and don't fall for it again. You gave them your email address, so they'll be sending you scammy emails trying to get you buy more non-existent stuff that looks perfectly wonderful to you because they know something about you, like a con artist would pitch you. Make sure you block them. If anyone tells you otherwise, it's a high probability they're either misinformed or getting paid to hook you into another round of pointless web-surfing for nothing...except maybe glittering eye-candy. Of course, capitalism is wonderfully insensitive to your morals and remarkably efficient (capitalism is just an observation, not a theology) and even if you build your business on a tower of socially tolerable deceptive and user-disdaining practice, well "there's a sucker born every minute" so you may likely still develop enough margin to succeed in your enterprise, and may thus afford to disdain those less savvy users...
didntknowyou 7y ago
yes we have a major local eCommerce store that shows out of stock items in results, only to have an error page when you click on it or add to cart. so many complains about it on their social media.
saurik 7y ago
I used to own a very-minor worldwide e-commerce site where I sold software and had a bunch of people say that I should hide all the software that wouldn't work on your device (most often due to operating system version requirements) from searches. I did that, and then had even more people contacting me saying that they knew I sold X but they couldn't find it; my conclusion is that the people who think you should not show out of stock items are annoyed because they think their experience could have been faster, but they are merely filing feature requests as they know exactly what happened and simply disagree: the people who were confused because the item did not show up at all--even though their friend told them it would be, they saw it in an ad, or they installed it on another device--are filing bugs, and this actually incurs costs handling the customer service complaints that result as you have to explain to them what happened and then defend why you thought it was a good idea. I thereby changed back to showing everything, now content with ignoring the feedback that I continued to get for the next decade that some people would prefer the other behavior. I'll also note: when I go to a store and something is out of stock, I find an empty shelf where the item would go that usually has a little tag dedicating that space for that item and telling what its price would have been were it in stock. If I don't find that empty shelf, I end up wandering the store thinking it must just be in a different section and eventually ask someone who works there where to find it, because I am confused, and I am now costing the store money for a sale they aren't even going to get (as the item is out of stock). I thereby don't even agree that the physical metaphor of going to a brick and mortar store makes any sense as an argument for hiding out of stock search results, as brick and mortar stores actually do return placeholder hits for items that are out of stock, both when you ask an employee "where might I find X" (who probably doesn't know if they are out of stock) and when you go to the right section and scan for "what items exist that are similar to X".

by nkrisc 7y ago

TeMPOraL 7y ago

... or just have a prominent switch on your search result page. [ ] Show out-of-stock items. Unchecked by default, to cater for majority use case.

nkrisc 7y ago
It's that simple! Why didn't we think of that!? Of course that existed. It didn't matter because the initial state did not meet their mental model of how it worked. We probably could have made it the biggest thing on the page and they still would have ignored it because they were not looking for it. For unrelated reasons we were not hiding out of stock items by default. Wasn't my call.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > It's that simple! Why didn't we think of that!? Many did. I fail to see what's difficult here. You can simultaneously achieve the following: - Provide aforementioned filtering switch. - Sort in-stock results first, or split the results into two groups (in/out stock). - Mark the out-of-stock results clearly on the search result page, e.g. by overlaying a big "OUT OF STOCK" label on top of the item picture. At the risk of sounding smug, I think all this requires is thinking about what your users need to make a decision that's in their best interest. The "clicked the product page and then found out it was out of stock" should never, ever happen; that information needs to be available on the search results page. EDIT: From your edit I understand that the problem boiled down to these items being shown by default, which was unexpected by the audience. That's truly the kind of issue that may become apparent only after deploying and getting feedback from people. That said, were the out-of-stock items clearly marked on the results page? Personally, I'd be super-pissed if they weren't.
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    Everything was there, they didn't believe it I suppose. They had a very rigid expectation that didn't mesh with otherwise common e-commerce practices. They believed that of an item was shown on the results page, it had to be in stock. As if there was a pressure sensitive pad on the warehouse shelves where the item goes to determine if it shows up in the results or not. We could have designed for this audience, but at the expense of more numerous, savvy users. Believe me, we had many very smart people working there, we had a good handle on the situation. There's plenty I left out here to make a point regarding out of stock items and certain expectations regarding them.
    - no-s 7y ago
      >>We could have designed for this audience, but at the expense of more numerous, savvy users. Of course, that could be interpreted as snide. Very snide. Pardon me, I feel I must respond from a perhaps cynical perspective, but in the spirit of HN, this should not be interpreted as a personal attack, please consider it as a form of customer feedback resulting from real-world experience...: Lets imagine your unsophisticated user wants to buy something. Your team has made sure the desired product is splashed on all the relevant search results with vim and vigor, nay, it hunts them down with delightfully appealing charm. Then the not-so-savvy target follows the trail, most assuredly identifying themselves as an eager customer, providing all sorts of delightful self-identifying information so that future marketing will surely be able to follow up with grander offerings specifically targeted to their needs! Sadly, the little "in-stock only[ ]" checkbox was ancillary to the much more important (as determined by high-quality tests run by the best consulting firms or maybe just lower-cost magical thinking) page features like "buy this immediately" button and "most popular choice" banner. Thus the user guided by top-notch design immediately launched into the purchase process and enters payment and shipping information as prompted, then clicks the final checkout button only to be informed by pop-up the item is out of stock! To add insult to injury your site actually authorizes the payment and says the item is backordered and thus delivery may be delayed N+1 weeks, where N is the limit of what any reasonable person would expect and WTF didn't it tell them before it went down this rathole. At which point my spouse/parent/adult child comes to me and asks me why they found this thing to buy but they can't seem to get it...to which I reply, this is a scam, cancel payment if you made it and don't fall for it again. You gave them your email address, so they'll be sending you scammy emails trying to get you buy more non-existent stuff that looks perfectly wonderful to you because they know something about you, like a con artist would pitch you. Make sure you block them. If anyone tells you otherwise, it's a high probability they're either misinformed or getting paid to hook you into another round of pointless web-surfing for nothing...except maybe glittering eye-candy. Of course, capitalism is wonderfully insensitive to your morals and remarkably efficient (capitalism is just an observation, not a theology) and even if you build your business on a tower of socially tolerable deceptive and user-disdaining practice, well "there's a sucker born every minute" so you may likely still develop enough margin to succeed in your enterprise, and may thus afford to disdain those less savvy users...

didntknowyou 7y ago

yes we have a major local eCommerce store that shows out of stock items in results, only to have an error page when you click on it or add to cart. so many complains about it on their social media.

saurik 7y ago

I used to own a very-minor worldwide e-commerce site where I sold software and had a bunch of people say that I should hide all the software that wouldn't work on your device (most often due to operating system version requirements) from searches. I did that, and then had even more people contacting me saying that they knew I sold X but they couldn't find it; my conclusion is that the people who think you should not show out of stock items are annoyed because they think their experience could have been faster, but they are merely filing feature requests as they know exactly what happened and simply disagree: the people who were confused because the item did not show up at all--even though their friend told them it would be, they saw it in an ad, or they installed it on another device--are filing bugs, and this actually incurs costs handling the customer service complaints that result as you have to explain to them what happened and then defend why you thought it was a good idea. I thereby changed back to showing everything, now content with ignoring the feedback that I continued to get for the next decade that some people would prefer the other behavior. I'll also note: when I go to a store and something is out of stock, I find an empty shelf where the item would go that usually has a little tag dedicating that space for that item and telling what its price would have been were it in stock. If I don't find that empty shelf, I end up wandering the store thinking it must just be in a different section and eventually ask someone who works there where to find it, because I am confused, and I am now costing the store money for a sale they aren't even going to get (as the item is out of stock). I thereby don't even agree that the physical metaphor of going to a brick and mortar store makes any sense as an argument for hiding out of stock search results, as brick and mortar stores actually do return placeholder hits for items that are out of stock, both when you ask an employee "where might I find X" (who probably doesn't know if they are out of stock) and when you go to the right section and scan for "what items exist that are similar to X".