True for when they are completely out of stock, but if there’s only 2 left you have no idea how long it will be out of stock once those 2 are gone, so you’re motivated to buy now versus wait until you actually need it. If it said there are only 2 available to ship immediately and 103 available to ship within 2 weeks, I can make my decision without feeling pressured by inadequate information. I may be the only person who feels this is misleading, whether it’s done with devious intent or not.
More information always allows the buyer to make a decision better suited to their total circumstances that only they know.
Less information reduces that benefit to the buyer. So yes, it’s devious behavior by the seller.
By that standard, I can’t think of a single seller that isn’t ‘devious’…
I agree with your position in theory, too, but in practice it’s risky for Amazon to promise you what it may or may not be able to deliver.
Supply chains are difficult to manage, particularly when many critical components are sourced from many different countries, and where final assembly may be done in a faraway place like Asia.
Throw freight in the mix – particularly when we’re often looking at cargo containers coming on freighters across great distances – and add in things like customs … and it’s easy to have anticipated delivery dates fall far, far behind.
The Inventory Management implications of what you think you may have available (ie, 25 widgets in 10 days, 125 more in 30 days, etc.) are really, really complex.
I really don’t think they’re doing that to pressure you into buying. Because it doesn’t put any pressure on you to do anything but buy something else or somewhere else. If you can’t buy that particular product, odds are that Amazon offers the exact same item from a different seller, or an extremely close match. And if they don’t, you buy it from Walmart.com or Target.com or eBay or any number of online retailers. Those in-person pressure sales tactics don’t work for online retailers. If you feel pressured, it’s probably because you forgot how online sales work.
I’m not saying Amazon doesn’t do that sort of thing. Of course they do; they’re blatant about it. They have “deals of the day” and “lightning sales” and “Cyber Monday” and so on. So they’re definitely guilty of it, hell probably more guilty than any other retailer I can think of. But pretending to have a limited quantity is not an example of it. Like I said, it makes no sense and wouldn’t work on anyone who knows how to do online shopping.
I guess it would be easy. I’d also guess they don’t bother. For the FBA stuff, why would they care? For the Amazon stuff, they’ve got tons of it.
What the number on your screen is based on is what they call Reactives, and the number is pretty fluid. The system tracks all the inventory physically in the FCs and something is flagged Reactive when an order is placed, meaning it’s still in inventory somewhere but flagged to go out sometime that shift. As far as the ordering system knows, that’s what we have. But orders get canceled, items turn out to be broke or missing, stuff that’s fine when you put it on the conveyor never makes it to shipping, someone finds a box of something missing an adds it in.
But that’s Outbound - the folks in Inbound have literally hundreds of semi-trailers out back. Minutes after you order, someone somewhere in the country could open a truck with hundreds of your novelty mug and bam, they’re back in stock. It could also sit out there for as long as a month, steps away while the system says we’re out. Because you see a lot of damaged items, wrong items, or missing items, it’s Schrodinger’s inventory until someone processes the stuff.
But the nature of the beast is that randomly, someone will order the last “I’m not a gynecologist… but I’ll take a look” mug seconds before the number changes from last one to fully stocked for whatever reason.
I’ve seen this message before and wound up not buying. Within a day, I nearly always see it changed to say that the item is out of stock, and that I’ll have to wait a certain number of days before it will be back in stock for it to ship.
The only times I haven’t are when the item is not particularly popular. So it was expected that no one may have bought it that day.
So I do not think they are lying. It would be counterproductive to have to pretend to be out of stock and wait a few days if they were not out of stock.
Never thought about leaving “items in cart” may throw off “items available”. I am guilty of leaving “items in cart” as some websites you need to put the items in cart to get the price and/or to get the shipping charges. I will be much more vigilant about emptying my cart if I decide not to purchase the items.
Now my pet peeve is “out of stock” but still listing the item. So the vendor is assuming it will be back in stock sometime? I have waited for over 2 years for an item that is out of stock and has yet to be “in stock”. Some items have an “estimated availability date” which is nice, but if you’re never getting it again pull the listing. I know the original thread was for Amazon but I am relating my experiences to Amazon and other websites.
See I like both those “gimmicks.” They are helpful to me. “Frequently bought together” has come in useful when I couldn’t remember the name of a certain doohickey that I needed to go along with the item, or I didn’t know what adapter might be necessary, or if I didn’t read the “batteries not included” or I whatever. I may not buy their exact suggestion, but I’ll know what to read the description for and what to search for.
Similarly, with “customers who bought this also bought” lets me either check out similar products, some which may be cheaper (as already mentioned) or for items that customers did truly also buy that were tangential to my item. This is helpful when I’m gift shopping for someone else. I may know what primary gift I want to give, but am not sure about secondary gifts (I usually buy a group of gifts for someone.) This gives me good ideas. Or, also, when I’m buying a book for myself. It alerts me to other books that may be interesting to me, and frequently they are.
On at least one occasion, they saved me some extra work or mishap. I was buying plastic discs with a groove to hold a piece of thick paperboard. The “Also bought” section led me right to the appropriate thickness paperboard and some heavy scissors for cutting it. I could have tried to figure it out myself but also might have bought the wrong thickness. That’s not something that happens every time, of course, but I can safely ignore the suggestions when they don’t apply to me for that purchase.
Bottom line here is that this isn’t a problem Amazon has any real incentive to solve–not until/unless Walmart or someone else starts to catch up. Similarly, let’s face it, other than the basics of reading, Kindle software sucks; Alexa is abominably stupid, and the Alexa app is a joke.
Amazon focuses on getting you your crap as quickly as possible so you’ll buy more. Period. To that end, I’ve seen them manage to combine two separate orders, or a Subscribe&Save item with a one-shot item ordered at just the right time, into the same box. That gets them both here faster (and cheaper for Amazon): that was a problem worth their while to solve. Kindle? Alexa? Heck, they’re selling like hotcakes, why would they care?
(And yes, I realize Google Home and whatever the Apple thing is called are at least serious competitors to Alexa; we have a Google Home as well as several Echo units, and it is smarter. Just not smarter enough to take down Alexa, apparently.)
When I worked for Eastbay there was a warning when we went below a certain number of items in stock; I have forgotten what it was. 2? 5? Something like that. This meant we could not guarantee they could get the item. The reason, we were told, was that there could be more people ordering it at roughly the same time as you were taking the order than we had the product available.
The arguments from customers! No, I can’t just “walk into the warehouse next door and double check”. For starters, the warehouse was about 10 miles away.
Very much like the insurance biz concept - and often quite scary - known as IBNR. “Incurred but not reported” - exactly as it sounds. Well-run insurers have a scarily-accurate grasp on this figure based on highly detailed actuarial data, and they must for proper reserving (money expected to ultimately be paid out) and proper financial health. Insurers have regulatory requirements to properly reserve for IBNR, and failure to do so has led to insolvency in more than a few cases. Over time your IBNR reserving, properly forecast and set, should vary little from conversions to actual reported losses.
For Amazon’s own stock - I don’t know.
For third party vendors, it’s trickier.
Vendors who sell on Amazon get in trouble if they can’t fulfill orders - at best, they lose positioning. They can also be banned from Amazon (which is bad for sales). So they update Amazon with how many of an item they have left in stock. Amazon keeps track of how many have been bought and stops selling the item when there are (reportedly) none left. The vendors update the information to Amazon on a regular basis (if they’re selling elsewhere, there may be fewer items left. They may get new shipments. etc.)
Some vendors who are worried about selling out don’t reveal their full inventory to Amazon. They hold back a few for their website - just in case.
Some vendors who may be less scrupulous may tell Amazon “we have 3 of those,” despite having a warehouse full of product, and Amazon puts up the “only 3 left” sticker. One or two sell. And then the vendor sends an updated list saying “we have 3 of those” and then Amazon puts the “only 3 left” sticker back up.
The bottom line is that declaring low inventory is a traditional call to action using scarcity as a marketing strategy. “Buy now while supplies last” isn’t something Amazon invented to deceive customers; it’s just one of the oldest tools in the salesman’s kit.
It is also away to provide consumers with relevant information.
My favorite tactic from the late-night commercials are when they put a timer on the info page. “Order within the next 20 minutes and get twice the doodads for half the quatloos!”
Relevant may still be deceptive however. As mentioned numerous times, if the low inventory is then replenished, you may have purchased something based on an incorrect assumption of scarcity. The inventory warmings may be technically correct (the best kind of correct) but that doesn’t mean they’re the whole truth either. I’m not saying this isn’t the best way to handle it, just that there are still flaws.
If you read “two items in stock” as “ONCE THESE TWO ITEMS SELL YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO BUY THIS ITEM AGAIN!!!” then you are correct. Until this thread, I have never encountered that reading of the phrase. I (and everyone I know who uses Amazon) correctly interpreted this as “Once these two items sell you will have to wait some time, between days to weeks, until the item is restocked”.
Understandable. I’m not usually buying commodity goods online where they always get restocked, like at the grocery store. I tend to buy things like bicycling clothing, outerwear, and tech products, and a lot of those things seem to be more “one and done” as far as manufacturing runs. Or at the very least, they’re the sorts of things that resellers may only stock a dozen total of, meaning only 2-3 in each size. If they don’t sell well enough they may not restock those items, or the manufacturer might stop making a particular model/design in favor of new ones (the “past season color/style” notices are very helpful, so you usually know once those are done they’re done, but they’re not used that often).
Even ordering direct from manufacturers can be tricky because they may only do a few manufacturing runs per year, and that inventory could be earmarked for resellers instead. The particular jacket I mentioned upthread appeared at Backcountry and Moosejaw before it even showed up on The North Face’s own store (they didn’t have any sort of new product release news about it either). It eventually appeared on their store, but by that time some sizes were no longer available at Backcountry and Moosejaw. In all three cases it still shows as completely unavailable from time to time. So the inventory is being replenished, but it’s just a trickle. Someone who hasn’t been watching it may see that only one or two out of six sizes is available at any particular store and think it’s a limited edition or the last manufacturing run before next year’s style comes out, paying full price rather than waiting for a sale later.
Many of these online retailers that don’t appear to be related also drop-ship from the same wholesaler. Not sure if I’m using the right terminology there, but for instance smaller bike shops with online stores can have an extensive “inventory” of clothing, parts, and accessories available for shipping direct or in-store pickup at a later date. Usually the “available in-store” items are a small fraction of what’s on the website. Ordering something that’s the last remaining at one store will see it disappear from dozens if not hundreds of others across the country. So some big online stores as well as smaller ones are pulling from a central warehouse/network which can give the appearance of much more product availability than there actually is.