What is Ecommerce Notify Me service

This feature or service will notify your interested customers when the product that is currently out of stock is available again.  In short notify the customer when the item is back in stock. Apart from that, additionally use this   feature on the product page for notifying new releases and let the customers interested in the product know when the product is available for order.  Read more about the same in our post: Notifying new releases

• The good news is, even the product is out of stock customer is willing to purchase when it is back.
• The Bad news is, if you had the product the customer would have bought it now itself. Who knows till the product is back customer may lost his interest or may buy from another store. 

Example template:

Acknowledgement:  Image is taken from Flipkart.com

Customer entered his email id and ask to send notifiy via email,  when it is back.




At least,  "Notify Me" service will give you  little chance to sell the product when it is back in the inventory.   It should as well trigger procurement service to procure the product. Is that all? No, it give a chance to correct the system - it gives actionable metrics.

Components of Notify Me service

1. Java script component where customer inputs his email id.
2. Notify Me service ( probably SOAP service)
3. Client code to call this Notify Me service

The operations of  Notify Me service

1. Write operation: When customer fills his email id to notify the product arrival, the service needs to save <product-id, customer email id>  details.
2. Notify operation:  When out of stock product is received at the inventory,  the service needs to notify all the customers who are waiting on that.

If you ask what exactly a notify me request means, in business context it is opportunity cost. It is some kind of feedback to your demand forecast/ inventory prediction system that you have failed. The system should able to pull analytics from the notify db and give it as input to prediction system. This is actionable metrics for a product. Read more about how to build such Notify Me service in our post:  Building scalable Notify Me service