What to do with out-of-stock products in an e-commerce?

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What problems can an online store without stock cause?
As I mentioned before, the user experience when finding a page without a product is very bad .

Let's think that if the user has reached the page in question, it is probably because he is already in the purchasing decision phase and we cannot let him leave. In addition, if your website has a properly executed SEO architecture , when the user arrives from an organic search, it is very possible that he has performed a search with a transactional keyword, that is, all the efforts made to correctly position the page in the search engines are being wasted.

Analyzing out-of-stock products and making decisions about what to do with them can bring benefits to organic positioning such as: improving the crawl budget, boosting URLs of products in stock or improving internal link juice, journalist email database among other factors.

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How can I find my out-of-stock products?
Before we start talking about what actions to take with pages without URLs, we must first identify these URLs .

Online stores generally have a high product circulation and it is not usually easy to control all the URLs of out-of-stock products that we have.

So what do we do now? Do we just leave these URLs lying around and focus on ranking new products?

Not at all, the first thing you have to do is identify all the URLs that do not have products and then decide what to do with them. How? Well, there are different ways to identify these URLs with scraping and crawling programs. For example, at SEOCOM we like to use the custom extraction function of Screaming Frog, launching a crawl of the product URLs and, using the extraction correctly, you can extract all the URLs without stock so you can then do an analysis.

custom extraction screaming frog
ScreamingFrog > Configuration > Custom > Extraction
Analysis of out-of-stock products
Once we have all the out-of-stock products extracted, we need to analyze these URLs. To do this, we need to gather the following information:

Organic Traffic: the extraction period will depend greatly on the type of e-commerce and the speed at which the ranges are renewed. We can consider an extraction period of between 12 and 24 months.
From Search Console, extract the following data from the last 12 months: clicks, impressions, CTR, average position and queries. If you are going to extract from the Search Console tool, you will only have 1000 URLs. To have all the URLs, you can extract all this information from the Search Console API for Google Sheets (Search Analytics for Sheets).
External links.
Once we have all this information gathered, we can begin to decide what actions should be taken with each URL. Many of these can be automated, however, some will need to be done manually.

Below, I show you a flow chart that can help you in making decisions regarding how to act in each case of URLs and then I explain each action in detail.

All the steps of what to do when your e-commerce runs out of product
Will the URL be back in stock?
If you plan to put a product back on sale, you must keep that URL so that it continues to be indexed and positioned. In this case, you can think of a strategy to keep the user on the website, capture the lead, and/or sell another product.

For example, adding a block of related products: “Sorry, this product is currently unavailable, but we have others that may also interest you,” and/or the option for the user to leave their email to be notified when the product is back in stock: “Sorry, this product is currently unavailable. Please enter your email and you will be the first to know when it is back in stock.”

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Does the product have a new version at another URL?
In case the URL is no longer in stock, the first thing we have to do is check if this product has a new version in stock.

In most cases, forgotten out-of-stock URLs are pages of old versions that have the same product in a new version. In this case, what we have to do is redirect (COD 301) the old version to the new version. Let me explain a fictitious case: let's suppose that the Nike brand in 2018 sold the Nike Mercurial 2018 boots and in 2019 the brand starts selling the Nike Mercurial 2019 boots. The 2018 boots are no longer in stock in 2019, however, the URL is still indexed and positioned for keywords such as nike boots, nike mercurial boots. Nothing more understandable than making a redirection of the 2018 URL to the 2019 URL, right? With that action, what we are indicating to Google is that now the URL that has strength on these keywords is the 2019 landing page for the Nike Mercurial boots.

Does the product have a similar version at another URL?
In case the URL does not have a new version in another URL, we check if the page has it in a similar one.

To give an example for this case, let's imagine that a multi-brand e-commerce store for electronic products no longer has stock of the Samsung 4k 2019 Full Array Premium TV, however, it continues to sell the Samsung 4k 2019 Full Array Elite TV. By redirecting the out-of-stock URL to the product in stock, the same benefits mentioned in the previous action will be obtained.

Does the URL have relevant organic traffic?
In the event that the URL does not have a similar version, we will look at whether the URL has relevant organic traffic . “Relevant organic traffic” can be very subjective, and depends a lot on the type of business and the URL. Generally, for a product URL, we can consider 365 sessions per year (one organic session per day), more than enough to maintain this URL. If the URL has enough organic traffic to not be removed, we should analyze which keywords the URL ranks for:

If they are keywords related to another product, we redirect to this product.
If the keywords are not related to any other product, we redirect the out-of-stock product to the parent category of the product. For example, if the long-sleeved blue checked t-shirt is no longer sold, this URL is redirected to the Checkered T-shirts category.
Does the URL have external links?
In the case that the URL does not have relevant organic traffic, we will check in our analysis if the URL has external links. We know that external links are a factor that gives credibility to the website, influencing organic positioning. If a URL has a valuable external link, we will not want to delete this page and lose this external link. We will follow the same pattern as in the previous action to know what decision to take in this case. We have to see why KWs position the URLs:

If they are keywords related to another product, we redirect to this product.
If they are not keywords related to any other product, we redirect the out-of-stock product to the product's parent category.
Delete URLs (COD 410)
And finally, if the URL also has no external links, this URL should be removed with a 410 code. We suggest using the 410 code instead of the 404 code, since with a 404 code, Google may interpret it as a website or server error and continue crawling and indexing the page. With the 410 code, we tell Google that this URL no longer exists and that it does not need to be crawled or indexed any more.