How to configure Magento 2 back-in-stock notifications?

There will be times that you are unable to fully provide the customers with certain products. However, customers can not sympathize with your store’s defects. They will feel frustrated and dissatisfied which can hurt your relationship with the customers.

To ease the customer disappointment, you can consider the solution to help your customer purchase instantly right after the item is back in stock. The product that I want to suggest here is the “Notify Me” function for Magento 2. Believe me! It is going to be worth your effort when you see the satisfaction that your customer can get.

Why do you need the Notify me function?

Although the Magento 2 Open Source edition and Ecommerce edition do provide the ability to utilize Back-in-stock alerts. However, it still lacks the flexibility to help your customers enjoy a seamless experience. Magento 2 Product Alert by Mageplaza is an innovative solution to help your customers keep coming back to your sites. To learn more about its benefits, just continue to read further in this section:

Improve customer experience

Let’s place ourself in the customer’s shoes! It is going to be frustrating when the customers recognize the item they out to purchase is unavailable on the store site. To ease this disappointment, the assurance that customers need to keep updated with the item’s latest news will be ideal to keep the customers from finding your competitors to purchase the item.

As a result, instead of losing customers, you can contact them via the email they left to get make frequent contact. This feature partly has the same meaning as the function of Abandoned Cart Email, which keeps customers informed of their uncompleted purchases.

Professional process

When they recognize their preferred items are sold out, they will have only one choice is to pay attention to the “Notify Me!” button which is placed below the image, the button will trigger a sounding popup to appear to assist visitors to fill in their personal email.

So, instead of redirecting to another page, they will have the chance to register to get notifications directly on the current sites. The time you spend to appear a popup will be definitely faster than loading a new page. Therefore, the comfortable and simple registration procedure will definitely satisfy your customers. This is also a good chance for you to collect visitors’ contact for future marketing purposes like an email marketing campaign.

In addition, with the function installed in your Magento sites, non-login customers can also experience the superb notifications. While Magento 2 default only allows login customers to receive notice of the sold-out item, you can miss many potential customers. Thus, the feature is going to be helpful to turn your visitors into customers, or ultimately boost up the conversion rate.

Inform customers instantly

The Back-in-stock notification allows you to deliver the restocked product easily. You can choose to send emails automatically or manually. This guide on how to set up an SMTP email in Magento 2 store may help you to have a seamless email sending.

Regarding automatic methods, the function can help the admin send emails automatically by running cron. You can set the cron running base on your own intentions to send emails to customers suitably. The manual function supports customers to gain better control of the exchange process and generate turnover faster when notifying the subscribed visitors.

Steps to configure Magento 2 back-in-stock notifications

General Configuration

First off, after installing the extension, users need to access the Magento Admin and select Store > Configuration > Mageplaza > Product Alerts

In this first section, you have to activate the Product Alert extension, Custom CSS and Cron Schedule.

The Custom CSS is applied to the Product List and the Product View page. For instance: .action.primary { background: #f311cd; }, .product.alert { background: pink,… The Cron Schedule field setting will decide the frequency of email sending. You can configure it to run the frequency every two hours. You can let it run according to the default value which means cron will run every two hours. As cron jobs can be quite complex for beginners, you can read detailed instructions via this link.

For example:

• Insert ***** means that the system will send an email for restock notifications each minute
• 20 */3 * * * means that the system will send an email at minute 20th after every 3 hours
• If you want it to run daily at 00:00 every day, please set 00 * * *
• If you want to run weekly on Sunday at 00:00, please set 00 * * 7. However, admins can choose other days a week like Monday at 00:00 by inserting 00 * * 1
• If you want to extend to run each month specifically at 00:00 on 1st January 2019, please fill in 001**

Note: When you fill in the values, the values must be separated with space. Without space between each value, cron can’t run properly. For instance: * * * * *

Alert for Out Of Stock Product

To activate the restock notification, you need to choose Yes option for Enable field. After the function is enabled, the Notify me link will show on pages of out-of-stock items.

Now, you can move on to select the customer group. Unlike the Magento 2 native function, the Product Alerts plugin allows customers that haven’t log in to experience restock notification. So, the email you gathered from this registration is going to be a great source of information to further communicate with them and strengthen the bond you and your prospects.

After that, you can choose to modify the information you want to send to the customers. The information that can be chosen to adjust is email sender, email template.

Note: It is likely for your notification email will end up in your customer’s spam box. However, you can prevent this from happening when installing SMTP.

For frontend display, you can choose to customize its display ability on the product page, the button text, and also the message for subscribing customers. If the Button Text field and Text for subscribed customers is left empty, the system will set the default value as below:

• Button Text: Notify me!

• Text for subscribed customers: Congratulations! You will receive a notification email when this product has just come back to stock.

Popup configuration

The extension assists flexible customization for the popup which appears after shoppers click on the Notify Me button. The areas you can adjust a popup’s heading, description, and placeholder, button text, footer content.

The module left you a blank space to add in your own words into the popup. Be playful and add your humor into the popup content. Your sense of humor might be the cure for your customer satisfaction.

Furthermore, if you want to stay loyal to a formal layout, you can save some time by leaving all of these fields blank. They will remain to use the default value:

• Popup Heading: Grab your chance when this product back in stock!
• Popup Description: Subscribe Back-In-Stock Alerts now! Register your email address to be the first to know when our product comes back. Do not miss your chance!
• Email Placeholder: Your email address
• Button text: Notify me!
• Footer Content: Kindly notice that the back-in-stock email will be delivered only one time, and your email address will not be shared or published with anyone else.

Configure alert emails

• Click on Stores > Configuration > Catalog
• In Product Alerts Run Settings, select the Frequency from the drop-down menu and set the Start Time to send the notification Emails.

Don’t forget to Save the settings and check the results on the front end.

Frontend performance

After following my guidance, the performance of the alert function will smoothly work on the store site like the image below:

Instead of disabling the sold-out items or showing Out-of-stock notification, a button will assure you to help your customers get a notification right after the item restocked. Notify Me! The button will display on the category page or directly on the product page:

After visitors click on the notify me button, the system will help you register on the product page via a popup. The popup with a simple interface will help you save time for the registration,

Subsequently, when buyers finished filling in their email and click on the Notify Me button, the popup will close and a notification of the successful subscription will appear to help the buyers aware that they will have the notification when the product is back-in-stock. It is a suitable measure for your customer so they will not have to come back from time to time to check for the item availability.

When the products return to stock, you can choose to send the information automatically by cron or manually. The content of the email will follow a premade template which will look like the email sample below:

Furthermore, for login customers, the extension can also help buyers to keep track not only via email notification but also via their personal account of your store. By login to your account, you will be able to view My Product Alert grid with details like product name, subscription date, and action to remove it, when you no longer your concerned good.

Final words

In summary, this article had guided you to learn more about the back-in-stock notification and how to utilize it. The function is featured in the Product Alert extension provided by Mageplaza. This high-quality extension will not let you down with the ability to alert the registered customers about Back-in-stock and Price Change items. Accordingly, customers will be well-notified of your products’ details and have more chances to buy what they want. It is one of the effective ways to optimize conversion rates and increase store sales.