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Do you let the user know about colours that might be available later?

Using this space to respond some open questions during my #axecon presentation: is eCommerce intentionally unaccessible?

Question

By Steve: Often not all colours of a product are currently available. Do you let the user know about colours that might be available later?

I love this question.

Short answer

It depends. If available, it's a nice to have. If the date is a false promise, then it could be more harmful than helpful.

Long answer

My impression is that this is a business decision with a pinch of technical difficulty. It involves having an inventory system or API that can provide this information for all the variants1 of all the products in the website.

Some companies might not have this information readily available or they might depend on third party vendors to have inventory available.

Having said that, would it help? I would say, yes. It could potentially reduce the anxiety of the unknown, while helping to do some time and budget management. This date must not be in constant change / update, if we learned something during the pandemic is that there could be delays on a promised date, creating more stress and anxiety than actually helping.

Going back to topic, if we assume that the coming available date is available, a question that comes to mind are:

  • How can we present this information in an already busy Product Card?
  • How and when should this be announced to Screen Readers.
  • How to make this information prominent in the Product Detail Page.
  • Would the product come back to availability or is it never coming back?

I hope this answer gets shared with Steve, and thank you very much for assisting the Conference.

If you are reading this article and didn't have a chance to attend to #AxeCon, there still a chance that the information is available for those that you. Follow this to my session, it has videos and closed captions.

Glossary

  1. Product variants: refers to the different variations of a product. For example: size, colour, width, fit.
  2. PDP: Product Detail Page
  3. PLP: Product Listing Page
  4. CLP: Category Landing Page
  5. SRP: Search Result Page