Inventory Intelligence: The Strategic Guide to WooCommerce Hide Out of Stock Products
Within the quickly changing world of e-commerce, it is the user experience that separates a sale from a bounce. There is nothing more frustrating than the excitement of purchase that is quickly cut short by the reality that the item is not for sale. When a visitor arrives at your store page, identifies a product that catches their interest, and is met with a “Sold Out” notice, it is a frustration. The frequent problem with items that are not for sale clutters up the visual tapestry and asks customers to do extra work to find what they are looking for. To have a tidy and professional-looking store, it is important that store owners understand the art of visibility—that is, how to efficiently WooCommerce hide out-of-stock items.
This is a tutorial-type piece intended specifically for store managers. We will examine what settings are available natively, when indeed using a hide out of stock products WooCommerce plugin is going to provide more value, as well as what implications of choosing to hide your WooCommerce items vs. de-emphasizing your out of stock WooCommerce items look like from an SEO perspective.
The UX and SEO Dilemma: To Hide or Not to Hide?
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Rather than jumping right into how to implement something in WooCommerce, it is necessary to provide some background information on “why.” Why should you use WooCommerce to hide out-of-stock products?
Less Friction: When 30% of your catalog is out-of stock, customers are forced to navigate through the non-relevant products until they reach the ones they are interested in buying. Removing these products makes the buying process easier.
Conversion Optimization: A cleaner catalog helps to draw the user’s focus on the in-stock availability, thereby increasing the chances of placing them in the cart.
However, there is a counterpoint related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When you fully “hide” the WooCommerce products that are out of stock site-wide, you’re basically removing them from the site architecture. If the product page was getting much traffic from Google and was placed high up in Google results, now that the page is a 404 (or soft 404), you’re losing all that search equity. The approach you’re taking to hide the product pages is very important.
Method 1: Native Solution (The “Hard Hide”)
This method requires
If this is common for many stores, especially ones which turn over inventory quickly where articles that are currently out-of-stock seldom come back, like with “fast fashion,” then the best solution is often the simplest one. WooCommerce offers a functionality for this.
To enable the default feature ‘Hide Out of Stock’ products in Woocommerce:
Go to your WordPress Dashboard.
Navigate to WooCommerce->Settings.
Click on the Products tab, followed by the sub-link for Inventory.
Identify the selection marked “Out of Stock Visibility.”
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Select the box marked “Hide out of stock items from the catalog.”
Close changes.
Once activated, this option will remove immediately from your primary Shop page, Category pages, and Search results any product that has been registered as having a quantity of zero in stock. Its effectiveness is undeniable in that it quickly eliminates the clutter. Nevertheless, this option is also an “all or nothing” solution. At this juncture, it becomes clear that hide out of stock products woocommerce has some drawbacks as a native feature of WooCommerce because this option does not provide for exceptions or “waitlists” for hidden items because the end user cannot access the page.
Method 2: The Strategic Alternative (“Soft Hide” or Sorting)
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In the case of stores planning to restock articles, it is often a mistake to completely eliminate the item from the website. You want the consumer to know it exists, but you don’t need it to be clogging your first page of your shop website. This is where the use of the word “sorting” as a replacement to “hiding” comes into play.
Rather than having the item removed, some of the most successful entrepreneurs opt to hide the out-of-stock WooCommerce products only from the top of the display. They ensure that the products not in stock are relegated to the end of the page on the category listing. Consequently, the URL of the item remains functional for the purposes of search engine optimization, and customers searching for the specific item will be able to locate it, possibly to register for notification when the item will be back in stock.
Method 3: Advanced Control with a Hide Out of Stock Products WooCommerce Plugin
This method involves the use of a Hide Out
For accomplishing the “push to bottom” approach or to apply more fine-tuned rules, you will need to use a professional tool. A professional hide out of stock products WooCommerce plugin enhances the original capabilities of the platform. It provides fine-tuned control, which cannot be attained by utilizing the original settings.
“The reasons why investing in a dedicated plugin over building your own can be the superior alternative have been mentioned previously within this discussion.”
In this statement, the
- Sorting Out-of-Stock Items: As mentioned, a good plugin is supposed to enable you to make your items visible while automatically moving them to the end of the list. This is supposed to meet both the UX and SEO requirements.
- Variation Visibility: This is one of the toughest issues for a WooCommerce store. In variable products, such as a t-shirt for which customers can select S, M, or L, sometimes a particular option such as Small may run out of stock but Large sizes are available. In such a situation, the default “hide” option for out of stock products may act erratically depending on your site configuration. An advanced hide out of stock products for your WooCommerce plugin can help in hiding a certain variation of a product in the dropdown menu in order to avoid disgruntlement for the client.
- User Role Visibility: For B2B businesses, you may choose woocommerce hide any out of stock product from general retail visitors but show them for your distributors who understand backordering. The plugin permits such role-based visibility so that bulk orders are not lost simply because there is zero stock.
- Category-Specific Rules: Maybe you would like to hide sold-out items from the “New Arrivals” section so that it looks updated, but you may wish to display sold-out items in your “Clearance” section with a status of “Sold Out” so that customers know what they have missed. The hide out of stock products WooCommerce plugin enables you to do this.
Implementation Guidelines & Best Practices
When you chose to hide out of stock products site-wide in WooCommerce, take the following best practices into consideration for creating a healthy site ecosystem: Redirects: When using the native feature to remove items that are never returning, consider using 301 redirects to point to the parent category. This allows the “link juice” from your dead product page to flow to your category page and maintain your SEO equity. Wait Lists:
If you want to hide the product from view in the catalog site, but allow access to the direct URL (by using a plug-in, for example), you can add an opportunity for people to “Notify Me.” Visual Indicators: If you decide not to hide the out-of-stock Woocommerce product items but instead place them at the end of the page, make sure these items are highlighted in a certain distinctive manner so as not to be clicked on as if they are buyable. Conclusion Handling inventory visibility is an art of balancing between having your retail page look fully stocked and having an optimal shopping experience. While having the ability to hide out of stock products is great with woocommerce hide out of stock products, it may be too crude a tool for brand-building. By utilizing the robust hide out of stock products woocommerce plugins, store owners acquire the capability of sorting, filtering, and managing via intricate rules. Irrespective of the fact that you opt to have the unavailable products completely hidden or at the bottom of the webpage, the final aim will always be the same: to improve conversions. When you hide out of stock products woocommerce successfully that have not been purchased yet, you direct the user to the ‘Buy Now’ option.
