How to hide sold out products via online order forms

Selling or taking orders for products online can be a huge boon for your business, but not having enough stock on hand to fulfill incoming orders can be really problematic.

Along with being embarrassing and potentially costly, enabling people to place orders for items that you can’t deliver can ultimately damage your organization’s reputation.

New improvements to all of Jotform’s payment processor integrations now ensure that people are only buying items that you have on hand.

This handy feature has also been added to Jotform’s product list field, so you can still limit the number of items that are up for grabs without collecting payments from people who fill out your online order form.

This added feature now enables organizations of all sizes to better sell products through their online form without constantly logging into their Jotform account, manually removing items from their forms, or worrying about whether they’ll receive too many orders.

In fact, many of these new changes were largely guided by feedback from a number of businesses, organizations, and nonprofits that must limit the number of products offered through their online forms.

Though Jotform’s inventory widget enables organizations to indicate how many items are in stock and automatically prevent people from placing orders once the stock runs out, some Jotform users said that it couldn’t meet all of their needs. More specifically, these users reported

• Working off hours to constantly monitor and manually update the amount of available products for sale
• Inadvertently getting too many orders because order forms couldn’t keep track of which items were already sold out but still in the shopping carts of people who were checking out
• Needing to manually disable products when there was no stock left
• Forms taking longer to load because of the multiple inventory widgets that they needed to use

Because Jotform is an online data-collection tool that’s constantly reimagining how workflows can be streamlined and automated, we knew that something had to be done.

We used this constructive feedback — from form support threads and user research interviews — to develop the stock management feature that you see today.

There are a lot of practical and useful options built into this new feature, so we’ll walk you through it and point out the different ways it can be used.

1. Get an email notification when items are running out

Seeing a huge surge of online orders through your form is supposed to be great news, but getting more than you can handle can be a major problem for your organization.

Constantly monitoring the number of items that can be ordered through your form and making manual updates is frustrating and can eat up a lot of your time.

Jotform’s stock management feature enables you to receive email notifications when your products are about to sell out and when they do sell out.

These notifications are automatically sent to the email address associated with your Jotform account after the number of available items reaches a specific threshold. For example, a nonprofit can choose to receive a notification email when there are only 12 cans of pasta sauce left on a food pantry order form.

If you’re selling individual products with different options, such as clothes in various sizes and colors, the stock feature can place a cap on the number of items available for each option and send an email notification when your inventory is running low. For instance, you can opt to receive a notification email when there are only 10 blue, medium-sized T-shirts left. If other items in your online store are low on stock or have sold out at the same time, the alerts will be grouped together in the same email notification.

When customers place orders through your form, the quantity of items in the Available Stock menu changes accordingly. The ability to monitor the number of items that are readily available will ultimately improve the inventory reconciliation process for your organization.

When there aren’t many items or options in stock, the stock management feature has a safeguard that will let people order only what’s available.

2. Halt pending orders for items that have sold out or run out

Selling items online can be tricky, especially when you run out of items and need to prevent people from ordering any more.

As a good case in point, sometimes a product will sell out in your online store but not before customers place the item in their shopping carts. Although these items may no longer be available in your online store, customers who have these sold-out products in their shopping cart may still be able to complete their purchase. 

Jotform’s stock management feature includes a safeguard that will prevent anyone from ordering items that have sold out. If customers already added these sold-out products to their shopping cart, they will receive an alert saying that the item is no longer available. Customers who reload your online form won’t be able to order the sold-out items unless you restock them. 

Conclusion

Offering products online can be a lucrative move for your business, especially since more people are gravitating to the convenience and ease of e-commerce.

But unless you have the proper safeguards in place to offer only what you can fulfill, collecting orders can quickly become stressful and overwhelming.

Jotform’s new stock management feature can help your organization thrive and prevent unanticipated snafus by preventing people from placing orders for items that you no longer have in stock. The feature can also offer you some peace of mind by automatically sending notifications when items on your form are about to sell out or run out completely.

If you haven’t done so by now, give Jotform — and our new stock management feature — a try today. See how selling online can be easier and less stressful for you.