Out-of-Stock Police: Best Inventory Management App for Shopify?
Updated June 1, 2023
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Sometimes, popular products fly off the virtual shelves of your Shopify store, leaving you with no inventory to serve new customers. When this happens, it’s important to ensure your customers aren’t actively trying to place orders for “out-of-stock” items.
EGNITION's Out-of-Stock Police is a tool designed to assist store owners in optimizing and automating this process. The tool helps you to automatically push sold-out products to the bottom of your collections, so they’re less likely to get audience attention. Alternatively, you can hide your out-of-stock products completely until you refill your inventory.
Pros
- Free package for up to 49 products
- Easy-to-use interface
- Customized sorting rules
- Automated workflows to save time
- Increased SEO performance
Cons
- Can have a slight learning curve
- Expensive for the most advanced plans
Out-of-Stock Police: Pricing
Out-of-Stock Police offers a 7-day free trial to beginners, followed by a range of plans. There’s a free Bronze package, which supports stores with up to 49 products and 99 collections.
This plan includes real-time automation, the option to hide or push your out-of-stock items down your collection lists, and tagging for out-of-stock products. You can also access 24/7 support and stock alerts. The paid plans essentially increase the number of products and collections you can manage, but they all include the same features. Options include:
Customer Support
Out-of-Stock Police promises 24/7 support to customers on every plan, including the free version. The company regularly releases new product updates and improvements, and guarantees fast responses if you’re having an issue with the app. However, the only real option for support is instant chat, so you won’t be able to call the team if you prefer to use the phone.
Notably, the chat isn’t real-time, but someone is usually available to answer a question within the first hour or two after getting in touch.
Who Is Out-of-Stock Police Best for?
Virtually any business owner on Shopify could benefit from Out-of-Stock Police. All e-commerce leaders want to ensure their stores look up-to-date and engaging.
That means it’s important to ensure your customers aren’t constantly facing “out-of-stock” notices whenever they click on a product page. Out-of-Stock Police helps to draw attention to the items you currently have available, so you’re more likely to generate conversions. It can also send you helpful automated alerts to let you know when you need to re-stock.
Out-of-Stock Police: Features
The focus of the Out-of-Stock Police app is to push your in-stock products into your customers' view, while moving out-of-stock items to the bottom of your collections. The tool integrates naturally with Shopify to help you organize your product portfolio. Key features include:
Boosted SEO
Out-of-Stock Police helps to boost your SEO by letting customers know when out-of-stock items will be returned to your site automatically. Rather than “hiding” pages, you can simply push them back in the collection queue, so they’re still indexed by Google.
Automatic Collection Management
The app will automatically push your out-of-stock items to the bottom of your collection as soon as your inventory status changes. This minimizes the amount of time you need to spend reworking your collections.
Customization
You can choose how you want to hide or move your out-of-stock items according to your inventory cycles. This could mean you set your product to be shown as “out of stock” for a certain number of days. If it doesn’t automatically come back in stock before the timer runs out, Out-of-Stock Police will continue to hide the product.
Tagging
You can assign specific tags to all out-of-stock items so you can use them in rules for smart collections, theme modifications, and other changes to your Shopify store.
Automatic Republishing
Business leaders can set the app to automatically re-publish hidden product pages when an item returns to “in-stock” status. This saves you the effort of manually removing and adding pages.
Notifications
You can get low-stock and out-of-stock alerts sent automatically to your email, complete with inventory data on a variant or product level. Easily export and download out-of-stock reports in seconds, so you can update your inventory.
Out-of-Stock Police: Ease of Use
Out-of-Stock Police is a relatively straightforward and convenient app. However, it might take a little time to get all of your automated workflows set up. You’ll need to define parameters like how long you want a page to be “pushed” to the bottom of your collection before the product is hidden.
Despite this, the natural integration with Shopify and the convenient interface makes this tool a great choice for beginners. Plus, there’s plenty of customer support available if you have any issues.
The Bottom Line: Is Out-of-Stock Police Worth It?
Out-of-Stock Police is a convenient tool for companies struggling to keep track of their “out-of-stock” items on a Shopify store. It can help you to improve your SEO standing, increase your sales, and maintain the engagement of your target audience.
Out-of-Stock Police: Best Inventory Management App for Shopify?
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