Architect Use Case: Back in Stock

Regardless of the vertical FMCG, fashion, cosmetics, and more, for a customer, it might be a big disappointment to hear "We are out of stock" from their favorite brand. Out-of-stock (OOS) is a fundamental problem for retailers too. We know that average sales losses caused by being out of stock present about 4% globally in today's world, with the high demand. The iceberg of OOS brings visible and hidden sides together. However, we can tell that on the consumers' side, these effects are seen mostly:

• Direct loss of loyalty,
• Decreased customer satisfaction,
• Permanent shoppers lost to competitors,
• Negative shopping experience.

This might lead to these actions by consumers:

• Delay purchase,
• Substituting within the same brand,
• Substituting with another brand,
• Not purchasing at all (Lost Sales),
• Losing consumers completely.

If you fail to create a good strategy for OOS, you will lose sales and even your customers to competitors permanently. Waiting for customers to come back and purchase the same item they are interested in is not a strategy, but you can contact them proactively and prevent your customers from trying other competitors’ products. For instance, you can send a message as soon as the product your customer is interested in is back in stock and available to purchase which might be a newly released signature brand dress that your customer visited but didn’t purchase because it was out of stock.

Based on segments of your customers, back-in-stock journeys can offer highly personalized journeys to your customers which might end with high rates of recovering lost sales. You can reduce all negative effects of OOS with these automated and personalized journeys.

Goals

While recovering Lost Sales with Back in Stock journeys, you can also improve your customers’ loyalty, shopping experience, and satisfaction and decrease the possibility of losing to other competitors. Every single conversion with this journey will assist you to:

• Increase Revenue
• Increase CLV (Customer Lifetime Value)
• Decrease CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
• Increase User Retention
• Decrease Time to Purchase
• Increase NPS

Requirements

Product catalog data and user data collection are required for the Back in Stock use case.

1. Product Catalog Data Collection

On Back in Stock utilizes the same data collection methods as the Smart Recommender product. Product catalog database integration is applied via 3 different methods and you can use only one of them or combine them in line with your platforms and use cases.

• Product Catalog Integration through Clickstream Data: Your product catalog information is being processed whenever any of your customers visit your website and product detail pages. This integration type requires system rules to be integrated and all the product information then will be collected and processed by Insider API. 
• Product Catalog Integration through XML: With this integration type, you can provide your own XML product catalog as a source for your product feed. You can do the Integration through Insider's InOne panel and send all the product attributes that have been provided on the XML file to the product catalog database through InOne.
• Product Catalog Integration through API: With this method, you can send your product catalog information through insertions and updates through Catalog API.

2. User Data Collection

• You should complete the Insider Tag integration.
• You should complete the SDK integration for mobile app data reading.
• You should define the System rules.
• Events should be sent from the website, mobile app, and Upsert User Data API (if you are using one of them).

Creating a Back in Stock Journey

You can create a Back in Stock journey to notify your users when the product is restocked that they are interested.

Consumer Electronics, Cosmetics, Fashion Retailers, Home & Furniture, Jewellery & Accessories, Home Appliances, Supermarket Chains, Classifieds, Pet Products

Assume that a user visits their favorite consumer electronics retailer which is your platform to buy a newly released smartphone. But, as the user visits the product page, they see it is already out of stock because of many users have been waiting for this phone. The user has a voucher for a %10 discount but cannot use it and feels disappointed. Now, the user is looking for another website to buy it even if they don’t trust another brand. You would like to notify that user as soon as this product is back in stock again. As soon as the new smartphone is back in stock, you can check if the user is reachable via email, web push, or SMS and can send messages in every single channel mentioned according to reachability status to direct them to the smartphone’s product page.

1. Select a starter

Since it is a real-time case, as soon as the product becomes available to purchase, the journey is automatically triggered for customers who visit it.

On Back in Stock starter takes users on the journey immediately when the stock of a specific product is replenished, which the user has visited as many as specified times and has not made a purchase in the specified period. This starter is triggered by the stock update of the product on all platforms including the website, mobile app, and offline environment. Then, it segments the users who visited that product but did not purchase it in the past. 

You can select the number of times that the user should have visited the product in the desired time range and the period.

You can use Product Filters to exclude some product categories or some particular products based on their price.

2. Add flow logic

Before sending a back-in-stock message, you can check if users are reachable on that channel. If not, you can try another channel on another path. Also, you can use Next Best Channel to increase the possibility of engagement.

Also, you can set journey entry capping to not send a lot of messages to the same users. It helps you optimize your messaging frequency.

You can also use the User Eligibility setting to prevent users to enter the back-in-stock journey too frequently and receive the same type of messages.

3. Creating Content

You can add different messages to the journey flow, including App or Web Push Notification, Email, SMS, and Whatsapp. You can customize the message content with the products that might be interesting to the users. You might also want to show a banner by OnSite or In-App channel or use the remarketing opportunity by Facebook.

After deciding how you want to continue with the communication for back-in-stock, you can design your content. You can also add product attributes to the content of Web Push, App Push, Email, SMS, WhatsApp and Call an API channels.

1. Select Product Catalog and Back in Stock on the Add Dynamic Content menu.

2. After a while, the product might go out of stock again. After waiting for some time, in order to show users consistent content between the first message and the follow-up message, you can use Product Attribute Consistency. Check the Use the event that triggered this Journey when the user entered box.

3. Choose the product attribute that you want to insert in the content.

4. Choose the event parameter that you want to insert in the content.

5. You will see the respective information at the top of the page. Accordingly, the event parameter(s) you choose will be inserted in the content.

6. Define a fallback value for your dynamic content.

Email

You can utilize and customize ready-to-use back-in-stock email templates placed in Select Templates.

Web Push

You can select the product attributes such as name, URL, image, etc. for the content areas. You can also direct users to the product’s page via links and buttons. Also, you can use CTA buttons to increase engagement.

Below you can see how the flow looks like:

Advanced Level Back in Stock Journey

You can move your journey to an advanced level by checking user behavior and interactions deeply.

For example, you can check if the user’s discount affinity is high, and you can give promotion codes in the content for users accordingly so that when they see the product they look for is back in stock, you can even achieve higher conversion rates.

In addition, under starter parameters, you can set a custom value for the number of times visited to understand how interested users are in this product.

In product filters, you can exclude certain categories which are not your target or can exclude the products whose price is higher or lower than the desired price to maximize your campaign ROI.

After sending a back-in-stock message, you can control if the users complete your desired goal after a while. You can add a Wait element to give time to users. Then, you can add the Check Conditions element to check if the users perform the specified action. Thus, you can send more relevant, contextual messages by branching the journey flow to the different paths.

For example, you can check if a user made a purchase after the message you sent. If not, you can send another reminder for the restock. 

You can either select the Purchase box or find the same event in the Events box.

You set the purchase segment as negative (the user didn't make a purchase) based on how long you wait in your journey.

You can have A/B Split on the journey flow to compare different contents on the same or different channels, and the auto winner leads users to the winner content/channels automatically.

You can immediately exit the users from the journey when they meet the exit criteria. For example, the user can make a purchase again from the same category they bought before while they are waiting for some duration on the journey flow. To not send already-bought replenishable product content, you can exit users automatically from the journey regardless of where the user is at in the journey flow.

You can check multiple reachabilities on channels for users at the same time and you can lead them to the corresponding path.

Below you can see an example for advanced flow: