I will start a series of articles and videos exploring improvements you can implement in your business, Google Merchant Center & Google Ads; this will be the first part.
For this topic to be effective, you need to ensure that all out-of-stock products are kept in the data feed. The details I explain below will also not be available to all merchants.
So you have sold out of products and are contemplating which to stock. You would not want to overstock items that may result in limited sales. Warehouse space is something merchants need to take into consideration.
Merchants will re-stock items based on how much was sold in recent history. But would you not want more insight?
This is where Google’s out of stock reporting comes into play.
Navigate to Google Merchant Center Next > Analytics > Products > Click on the the Popular Products tab.
Now scroll to the bottom and check if you can see Your products that are out-of-stock if you don’t see this, then this article will not help you. Not seeing the data may be due to Google not having enough data on your selling items.
Now click on View all products
Now, you can sort by popularity, allowing you to see how popular a product is and how much it has increased and decreased in popularity. This will give you an idea of what item to stock more compared to products that are dropping in popularity. Big movers are a good metric to use, for example if something jumped in popularity by 300 or decrease in 300, will allow you to maybe stock more for big movers, compared to items that dropped in popularity.
The lower the number, the higher the popularity.
You can also see the average prices of competitors. Allowing you also to be more competitive.
You can also check how well the products performed last year. For example, today is July 2024, and I would like to know how well these products did in August 2023. Knowing what did well last year globally is another key data point allowing you to make better decisions on what items to stock.