What to do with video for things you can’t sell

Every store hits this and most handle it by accident. A product sells out, its video keeps playing, and a shopper taps through to a page that cannot sell them anything.

Three things that can happen

• Nothing. The card stays, the product page says sold out, the shopper leaves. The default, and the worst option.
• The card follows the theme. If your theme hides sold-out products, the card behaves the same way. Consistent, invisible, and usually correct.
• The card stays and captures interest. Best if you will genuinely restock, and actively harmful if you will not.

Why consistency with the theme is the right default

Your theme already has a policy about sold-out products — you chose it, or your theme chose it for you, and every other page on the store obeys it. A video widget that ignores it creates a store where a product is visible in one place and hidden in another, and the shopper who notices concludes something is broken.

Matching the theme means the decision is made once, in one place, and video does not become a special case anyone has to remember.

When to keep the card anyway

Two situations justify it.

A genuine restock. If the product is coming back with a date you would say out loud, the video is doing useful work: it is building demand for a thing you will have. Say when, plainly. “Back in March” is information; “coming soon” is not.

The video sells the category, not the item. A video that establishes what your brand is about can keep earning even if the specific product in it is gone — provided the tagged products include something buyable. A video tagged only to a sold-out item is a dead end regardless of how good it is.

The case against scarcity theatre

It is tempting to leave sold-out products visible because scarcity is persuasive. It is, briefly. What it costs is trust: a shopper who taps three videos and finds three sold-out products has learned that your videos do not lead anywhere, and they will stop tapping. That is expensive, and it is not recovered by restocking.

If you are going to use scarcity, use the true kind — low stock on something actually low — and let the sold-out ones go quietly.

The seasonal pass

Whatever policy you pick, look at your video library when a season ends. Content made for a range you no longer carry is doing nothing but taking up placements, and placements are the scarce resource — a limited number of pages can show video, and every one used by a discontinued product is one a current product is not using.