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Email Marketing, Business & Monkeys

Automatic inventory alerts by email

May 13th, 2009 | by Ben

sanuk-otifyWhen I was little, kids used to tease my shoes. I always picked really weird, functional ones with hidden pockets, or folding wings or ninja shoes with that separate toe-thing, so I could climb “escape ropes.” You know, just in case. After a while, ugly shoes became my trademark. My little one-finger-salute to the mainstream.

Anyway, I’ve been looking for some new ugly shoes at Zappos, and came across these babies (click the screenshot to the right). Not quite ugly enough for me, but close.

So yes, I’d love to be notified when they offer other shoes from that particular brand. Maybe their next lineup will be uglier. Therefore the little email signup box at the bottom is very useful to me, because c’mon—I’m not going to browse Zappos every day looking for shoes.

Many e-commerce shopping carts (like Magento) now come with built-in RSS feeds for inventory alerts. But who uses RSS? You’ll want a way to convert that RSS feed into email.

MailChimp users can do this easily with our RSS-to-email tool. I wouldn’t do it per-SKU. Perhaps a separate email list per brand or product category. Maybe pick only your most popular brands, at that. When people subscribe to that list, they’ll automatically receive an alert whenever the RSS feed is updated.

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4 Comments

    • Josh Colter says:

      Why do you recommend not using this per-SKU? This approach seems like it might be a nice solution to the out-of-stock problem for retailers. You could trigger an email to a customer as soon as the inventory is available.

      • Ben says:

        @Josh – Ah, sending an inventory alert per-SKU would be ideal. What I meant was that in MailChimp, RSS-to-email works by having users subscribe to lists. As an RSS feed gets updated, that list would receive an email. So you’d need to setup lots of individual lists per SKU in MailChimp. Or I guess one master “alert” list with lots of SKU-interest groups. Possible, but lots of work. I’d consider doing it for a hanful of SKUs that are high-demand and always selling out, maybe. But doing it by brand or product category might be more feasible.

    • Jordan Foutz says:

      This feature alone is the type of thing that would get me to use the service. I also hear there is a cool Mailchimp compatibility with Foxycart which we promote in our little design shop. Thx for the heads up on this feature!

    • Ben says:

      Ugly shoe update: Bingo!

      Inventory email alert pointed me to their “Sanuk Boutique” where I browsed around and bingo:

      http://www.zappos.com/product/7338107/color/5132

      perfectly ugly!

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