Make money without having products in stock

If you run a web shop you probably have the problem that now and then have the problem some products are unavailable or out of stock.

You can comfort your customers by back ordering the product or offering them equivalent product. Unfortunately this will not enhance the overall conversion rate of your website simply because you can’t offer your customer exactly where he is looking for (at that time).
That’s a pity: no conversion, no revenue, no profit.

What if you had a creative solution that would offer your customer a good alternative and would give you some nice extra revenue without having it in stock or available?

Let the competition in

Linking to a known competitive web shop will give your customer a good alternative, but is not profitable for you. Ok, how about an affiliate link then or affiliate banner? Again, it can give the customer a good alternative and if the customer actually decides to buy something from that store you will receive a commission.

Still, this is not the trick I crossed upon. You want an alternative for your customer and get paid instantly. Then what? Well, look at this (OSCommerce) web shop I stumbled upon.

The product I (fictively ;-)) was looking for was not available anymore. They cleverly placed on the product page some AdSense advertorials to offer me, the customer, “good service” and get clicks on the ads (which gives them cash per click). They force advise me to click on their ads with the following description:

“The product you are looking for is currently unavailable. Unknown to us is when the product will be available again. You can visit the following websites instead:“

Excellent stuff, right? Get paid without even having the product available. You could actually set up a complete web store like this. Just act you’re selling products and base your ROI on AdSense.

Pros:

• You offer your customer a good and relevant alternative for your out of stock product.
• It’s clever very way to get those (relatively low value) AdSense clicks (perhaps $3~10 cents).
• Relevant content and destination (most of the time) for your customer.

STOP IT RIGHT THERE!
Of course are there no pros for this kind of business model. Only if you hate visitors and paying customers. Hopefully you already noticed that as a professional webshop owner. In the utter case you still ain’t convinced that this is not the way to make money with your webshop, please read the cons…

Cons:

• Not really a convenient way for shopping at your webshop.
• You let your competitors advertise on your website.
• You don’t give you customers what they want. They will not buy from you anymore.
• The ads are not controllable so the customer can be mislead to a whole different product.
• Please, don’t do it. Embrace your customers instead of chasing them to your competitor.