Do you know which of your products SKUs are out of stock most often and might be costing you the most money?
Note: Search Discovery has built a product called Apollo that helps organizations improve their analytics implementations. This post shares one (Apollo BR37150) of the over one-thousand Adobe Analytics solutions that has been added to Apollo. If you’d like to improve your Adobe Analytics implementation, please reach out to us at apollo@searchdiscovery.com.
Track How Often Selected Product SKUs are Out of Stock
In my last post, I discussed ways to track how often product SKUs were selected and how many SKUs were selected for each product. In this post, I’d like to build upon that and discuss tracking how often selected product SKUs were out of stock. Many years ago, I wrote about how you could track out of stock products and quantify money lost due to out of stock products, but I never dealt with product SKUs. I highly recommend you read the previous post first if you want to understand this post in context.
To view how often each product SKU is out of stock, you need to set a new Adobe Analytics success event each time a product SKU is selected and it is out of stock. For example, let’s say that a visitor reaches Product A (and no SKU is selected by default). Then the visitor clicks to select product SKU A1 and then A2, but the latter results in an out of stock message. In Adobe Analytics, the viewing of the product page for Product A would count as a Product View and both clicks on SKUs would count as Product SKU Selected success events. In addition, when SKU A2 is selected and the out of stock message appears, a Product SKU Selected Out of Stock success event would be set. Here is what a sample report might look like:
As shown in my previous post, you can create a calculated metric that indicates how often each product SKU selected was out of stock using a formula like this:
This calculated metric can then be added to a report to show which SKUs are out of stock the most:
You can also view how often product SKUs are out of stock overall by using this new calculated metric independent of the Product SKU dimension:
Product SKU Defaults and Out of Stock
As mentioned in the last post, there are some cases in which product SKUs will be selected by default. If you want to view how often these default product SKUs are out of stock, you should add another success event to view this (Product SKU Selected (Default) Out of Stock). Here is an example of the success events that you can use between the last post and this one:
Money Lost Due to Out of Stock SKUs
The next logical step is to identify how much money your organization might be losing due to out of stock product SKUs. This can be viewed in Adobe Analytics by capturing the cost of product SKUs in a currency success event when they are selected and out of stock. As shown in the previous post, this potential amount of lost revenue must be multiplied by product conversion rate since selected product SKUs don’t convert at a 100% rate.
Since the process of calculating the amount of revenue potentially lost is essentially the same as in my previous product post, I am not going to repeat it here, but you should follow the same steps for product SKUs as shown for products.
