Why we discontinued “Inventory Counts”

Back in March we experimented with providing inventory counts here at Sewell. A few months ago we decided against providing the inventory counts and I figured I would share our reasoning for anybody else out there wondering if this will improve their conversion rate.When you provide inventory information (ie, how many of a certain SKU are in stock on the product page) you will probably see an increase in your conversion rate for B2C purchases - consumers like knowing that their product is in stock and will ship out right away. Our problem is that in many cases there is a corresponding decrease in the conversion rate for some B2B purchases. Since business purchases are typically much larger than consumer purchases we realized that even though we may see the quantity of orders go up, overall revenue did not.So why would orders go down for corporate/government purchases? Because these customers often want to buy 10’s, 100’s or even 1K’s of products at a time. So we may have, for instance, 43 units in stock for a certain product, but our corporate buyer wants 100. Usually we can get 100 from our supplier which will still ship the same day, but we were discouraging these purchases by indicating that we only had 43 available, so we figure that we are better off just saying that the product is in stock and letting volume customers call in to check availability.

7:05 pm

1 Comment

  1. thank you for your post! спасибо

    Comment by House Cleaning Maid Service New York City, NY — February 21, 2010 @ 12:18 am

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