Proposal for adding BackOrder as an enumeration member of ItemAvailability

[chollma]

Context

Online retailers are especially dependent on schema.org vocabulary as a standardized way to describe the evolving status of their products to a variety of systems including search engines. Today, there are a number of ways that a product can be described using the ItemAvailabilityattribute.

Problem

I believe there's a significant gap in this list, especially given the current state of consumer demand for online shopping, the encumbered state of our global supply chains during a pandemic, and our commitment to provide the best possible information available to customers.

The current version of the schema.org vocabulary includes PreOrder as a enumeration member of ItemAvailability. As I understand it, PreOrder refers to an item that is available for purchase but has not been carried by a business before.

Proposal

I would like to propose the addition of BackOrder to this list of members, because I believe there is a unique difference between PreOrder and BackOrder.

Details

As I understand it, BackOrder refers to an item that is out of stock, still able to be purchased and will be available again for customers at some point in the future, rather than being Discontinued.

Inclusion of BackOrder in the list of enumeration members for ItemAvailability will allow consumers of schema.org to describe the status of an item with more granularity than OutOfStock. In addition, it will allow other major business to utilize an updated vocabulary to better serve customers with their products (ie. https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324448?hl=en)

[RichardWallis]

See issue #1977 near by.

[chollma]

Thank you, @RichardWallis. I think #1977 is similar in nature to this request but not identical.

[taur]

This is a duplicate of #1632 in which #1977 was also referenced.

[philsward]

Yes, this is still a request as per my original request in #1632

Like I stated in my original request, BackOrder is different than OutOfStock. Neither of which, have anything to do with PreOrder.

Backorder vs. out of stock
Out of stock means that a product does not currently have any inventory available and does not have a date for resupply, while ‘backordered’ implies there is a determined date for products to arrive.

It’s the difference between “This item is currently unavailable” and “This item won’t ship [until 2 weeks from now, for 10 business days, etc.].” In other words, there is hope in the foreseeable future with a backorder. It might take a while, but you will receive the product.

When a product is ‘out of stock,’ there’s a chance that’s the case permanently, or at least will be for so long that the seller can’t predict when they will have it again.

Source: https://www.shipbob.com/blog/backordered-meaning/

This is actually backwards from how I "think" about the two, but if I need to change my thinking, I'll change my thinking. Point is, each term gives a specific reason for why the product isn't available.

[chollma]

I appreciate your comments on this issue, @philsward. Anecdotally, I believe the ideal life cycle of standard product should operate like this:

PreOrder > InStock > LimitedAvailability > OutOfStock > BackOrder > Discontinued

How I'm personally thinking about the two options (OutOfStock/BackOrder) from a customer perspective:

OutOfStock: this product was recently available to purchase, but is currently unavailable for purchase. It will likely be back in stock very shortly.

BackOrder: this product was available to purchase in the past and we know that you'll be able to purchase it again soon, but we'd like to set an expectation with the customer that this timeline (from purchasing to receiving a product) might be extended to as much as 30 days.

Given the state of our national and international supply chains for the foreseeable future, I think that better describing the state of an item as it relates to its availability will give consumers of this data more ability to set expectations with their end users.

[philsward]

Thanks @chollma

So you and I see eye-to-eye on the flow of OutOfStock -> BackOrder. I thought it was interesting that the industry standard apparently has it flip-flopped.

Regardless, it doesn't really matter what the "standard" may be, each term gives a different clue about the status of the product which is why I'm advocating for the inclusion.

[philsward]

Here's a thought...

We take one out of the B&H Photo Video marketing playbook and replace both OutOfStock and BackOrder with "MoreOnTheWay"

[HughP]

"More on the way" is fun, but some "Out of Stock" items at REI are not ever going to be back in stock.

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On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 10:29 PM philsward ***@***.***> wrote: Here's a thought... We take one out of the B&H Photo Video marketing playbook and replace both OutOfStock and BackOrder with "MoreOnTheWay" [image: image] <https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3436110/88335604-349f4e80-ccf9-11ea-9ea7-ae6c53cecac0.png> — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2651 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAAJ2JTCPBDYUV2OUGAWLCLR5CMRNANCNFSM4OZYJ7PQ> .

[philsward]

@HughP Thats why I have an availability status of "No Longer Offered" for my sites. If I said "Discontinued", that would indicate that the manufacturer is no longer making it. However when somebody says they no longer offer a product, it isn't discontinued.

If a company labels a product as "Out of Stock" because it has been discontinued or is no longer offered, the maintainers of those sites aren't paying attention to detail and don't really care how the customer interprets it. That or they are strictly sticking to the Schema way of doing it because big brother Google says they have to, which is the whole reason for this discussion. Google won't budge unless Schema says its: "OK".

There's also "No Longer Available" as a status which could mean either "Discontinued" or "No Longer Offered".

[taur]

For dropshipping the flow would be: PreOrder > BackOrder > Discontinued
here one could argue that "DropShipped" could be it's own availability that would replace InStock, because it's distinctly different from BackOrdered in that you have no intention of ordering it until an order is placed, the alternative would be having both BackOrder and BackOrdered, but the distinction would not be as clear.
BackOrdered in past tense semantically also makes more sense as it'd indicate that it has already been back-ordered and will be back in stock sometime soon.

[philsward]

@taur I'll agree that for the most part, drop shipping should go PreOrder > InStock > BackOrder

My business model is mostly dropship and we use backorder for most things that aren't available from the supplier. Mainly because the majority of the time, it can be 1 - 4 weeks before they have product available.

If we find out a product isn't available through a supplier and they say "We're expecting a shipment in either tomorrow or the next day", then I'll place the product as "Out of Stock".

[chollma]

Curious what the group thinks. If an item is OutOfStock or on BackOrder (as this proposal suggests), should that product be available for purchase?

It seems that there's some incongruousness on availability between websites.

My goal would be to arrive at some sense of parity so many systems can consume retailer information and display it consistently vs. having different understandings of status.

Let me know your thoughts.

[stephenhamiltonau]

No sure where we are at with this, but I think it is important. From my perspective, and that of my colleagues (we have a small ecommerce site with a couple of thousand sku’s for packaging products), out of stock means it will be back reasonably quickly (i.e. at most 14 days), but backorder means a longer wait (sometimes up to a few months). Generally we prefer to not take payment for anything we are not able to ship immediately, but that will vary from business to business I suspect, and it probably isn’t useful to define that aspect. But having it available for purchase in the sense an order gets placed, then yes, we do that. All existing (back)orders get priority when/if the stock finally arrives. Naturally, much of the benefit for consumers depends on how diligent retailers are in updating the schema to show the actual current status. I can see this could be a challenge for some where products are marked as backorder, but in fact there is no longer any chance of that item being made available (i.e. it has been discontinued). I hope this helps. Stephen

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On 24 08 2020, at 7:08 pm, Cooper Hollmaier ***@***.***> wrote: Curious what the group thinks. If an item is OutOfStock or on BackOrder (as this proposal suggests), should that product be available for purchase? It seems that there's some incongruousness on availability between websites. My goal would be to arrive at some sense of parity so many systems can consume retailer information and display it consistently vs. having different understandings of status. Let me know your thoughts. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2651 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AL5BQR5LNHDQQ7SIST22SC3SCKM7NANCNFSM4OZYJ7PQ>.

[philsward]

@chollma I'm in 100% agreement with @stephenhamiltonau

That said, if you do some Googling for for "Out of Stock vs Backorder", the when and why for both is completely up-in-the air depending on who you talk to (or who's blog you manage to read).

[github-actions]

This issue is being tagged as Stale due to inactivity.

[ghost]

In response to the proposal: I’d rather stick with the discrete nature over semantics, because the time series models have allowances for these logistics related things. These observations are neither considered “anomaly”, nor attributes; It is already hard enough that we can’t grab 100, but this will almost 100% corrupt the model.

[ghost]

Folks I couldn’t leave without placing a visible flag, exclusively due to the nature of the computation, but we should be using nothing but context free grammar for computational complexity at that level.

[philsward]

@pritoms you're going to have to dumb down your thoughts. I have no idea what you're trying to say.

[alex-jansen]

The proposal to add BackOrder on /ItemAvailability is something that Google also supports and sees as increasingly important for consumers (as well as the general ecosystem), especially during the ongoing pandemic.

As discussed earlier in this thread, and as opposed to OutOfStock, BackOrdered items are typically in the process of being restocked and can often already be ordered with a deterministic (maximum) delivery date. Given this clear difference in semantics we support inclusion in the next Schema.Org release.

@danbri

[philsward]

@danbri 🤗