Today we rolled out the new “ebay out of stock feature” , this allows you to set an item to out of stock. The item will remain live and active on ebay for a period of 90 days before ebay automatically cancels the item.
Users will still be able to see the item however there is no buy now button active on the page and a banner stating ” Item out of stock will be displayed”.
You will lose no sales history or best match rankings will an item is marked out of stock.
This feature is only available via the ebay trading API, our listing tool calls the ebay API’s when listing an item, the out of stock call was added to our new revise item function which was only added last Friday.
At this time there are no plans announced to make this feature available on ebay itself, this feature is also only available for item listed as “good till cancelled”.
Currently you will only be able to mark items out of stock if they have been listed from our listing tool. However we have already 80% completed the coding of a revise tool which will allow new sellers to bring in all of their items off ebay no matter what tool was used to list them, this would allow sellers to quickly apply any new item templates.
Note: the feature ” out of stock ” when no qunatity cannot be removed from an item once added, it can only be removed by ending the item and relisting it. (We don’t make the rules ebay does) However let me explain that a little better.
You have item called widget X and you see the quantity is getting low 5 left
You know you sell 2 everyday, by enabling ” out of stock ” function in 3 days time when you sell item instead of the item ending and you losing all of your sales history the item would automatically switch to out of stock, (No need to triple the price of the last item any more)
A week later you get more stock and revise the quantity, let say you had another 20 come back into stock, 10 days later you have sold out again, this time the item would be automatically marked as out of stock with no effort on your part.
All in all we see this a big step to helping sellers maintain their items sales history’s and at the same time reduce the workload for sellers in maintaining live active items.
