What is Backordering? Overview & Best Practices

Backordering is the practice of letting customers buy (and pay for) items you're temporarily out of stock on. Whether it's a response to a supply chain hiccup or part of your cost-containment strategy, learning how to handle backordering in inventory management can help you grow your business and succeed in a competitive ecommerce environment.

Taking customer orders that can't be filled just now but will be shipped in the near future helps you capture sales that would otherwise be lost. It can also be a deliberate strategy to keep your carrying charges as low as possible, though this advanced technique takes excellent inventory management software to pull off effectively.

What Is Backordering?

Backordering is the practice of taking an order from your customers on the front end for items you may not have in stock on the back end. This can happen because of shortages and a supply chain problem, such as when half your inventory is sitting on a cargo ship waiting to dock at Long Beach. You might also be doing just-in-time inventory management, in which the item doesn't ship from the vendor until the order is processed.

In this process, the request for a backordered item goes directly to a vendor rather than to the fulfillment warehouse. If your normal flow is for all orders to go through your delivery center, you might have a delay getting items delivered and processed. In a just-in-time model, you're effectively turning the vendor into your fulfillment center, which is a neat trick if you can manage it.

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Backordering & Modern Fulfillment

Running out of stuff used to happen a lot back in the days when most shopping was done at the dry goods store, and Old Mr. Parsons had to guesstimate how much feed and seed was going to move in the month it took to get a purchase order processed.

The 20th century brought much more complex supply chains and sophisticated cloud based inventory management tools. With automated inventory management software, containerized shipping, and smart database systems, inventory managers can drastically cut the time stock spends sitting expensively unsold on the warehouse shelves. 

With automated inventory management software, businesses can streamline their backordering process. Understanding the benefits of inventory management software can help you optimize this strategy for better efficiency and customer satisfaction.

This has real consequences for the customer experience. Being able to buy a thing, anything, in the time it takes to type a credit card number is one of the nicest features of the modern world.

Of course, you know there's a huge logistical tail wagging behind that dog. If a single thing goes wrong, you're looking at frustrating delays on the delivery date, costly overstocking of items not in demand, or even cancellations of sales you've already made.

Backordering + Inventory Management

Inventory management is where backordering is a lifesaver. Tell the customer something they want is out of stock and roughly when it will be available. Apologize for the inconvenience, and give them a close estimate of when it will be delivered.

If it's going to be too long, offer them an alternative, such as a similar item they can get now or a discount on the sale, to take the sting out of waiting. 

As you may have noticed, there's a lot that goes into that process. To make a customer happy this way, you have to, at a minimum:

1. Know that the item is not in stock.
2. Have an idea when it will be available.
3. Transmit that information to the inventory management database interfacing with your customer website.
4. Offer preset order fulfillment options, from a short delay to processing a discount or finding and recommending a substitute item.
5. Process the order and load the backordered items into your delivery workflow, ideally with an intelligent decision about whether to ship items piecemeal, as they come in, or all at once as a packaged order.

Note that:

• Items 1 and 2 are basically contingent on knowing your own inventory and supply chain. You can even start with free inventory management software and scale up from there as needed.
• Item 3 is a web design issue that can be as simple as a popup notice, but it has to be pegged to items that are actually on backorder, with the notice removed as soon as the stock is received.
• Item 4 is a web development/order processing issue, and it can be a headache if your front and back ends aren't properly integrated and talking to each other well.
• Item 5 is order fulfillment, and it's mostly going to happen at your warehouse with nothing more than high-level policy guidance from management.

What To Do When You Run Out of Stock?

So you have a customer who's decided to buy from you, and one or more of the things they want isn't in stock. You have a few options here, depending on what your lead time is likely to be and how reliably you can promise to have it delivered. Take this table as a suggestion, and feel free to adapt the strategies to fit better with your business:

When facing stock shortages, it's beneficial to also delve into the challenges faced in inventory management, providing a comprehensive understanding for better decision-making.

Backordering as a Deliberate Strategy

Backordering is more than an emergency management technique for your ecommerce business. You can build your inventory control around taking preorders for items you don't technically have in stock yet. Making your online store into what's effectively a distributor for your vendors has huge advantages if you can do it right.

How Does Backordering Work?

Say you run a small business online, and there's a new product coming to market that you just know your customers will love. You're not 100% sure of that yet, though, and you're not big enough to shrug off a major flop the way Apple can deal with low iPhone sales.

You don't know what customer demand will be, and disruptions to your limited cash flow could be a real problem for your bottom line.

What do you do?

• Start by building a regular product page—the same as you would if you had the out-of-stock items sitting in your storage space.
• Process payment for the inventory like normal, then forward the order to the wholesaler supplying you in something like a real-time exchange.
• Instead of ordering the stock for your fulfillment warehouse, which does nothing but increase wait times and carrying costs, use your order management software to pass along the customer's delivery address and have it sent directly there.

This is close to how Amazon did things when it first got started. Instead of maintaining costly facilities all over the world, the first really big ecommerce site just acted as a middleman for connecting a customer base with sellers of books and various odds and ends.

This liberated Amazon—they could skip the inventory tracking and turn the twin issues of excess inventory and low stock levels into somebody else's problem.

Keeping Backordered Customers Happy

If you're managing backorders right, the customer might never notice a backlog or delays in delivery time frames.

Still, it's good to have a communications strategy for when things don't go right. Keeping customers happy while you're doing complex backordering work with the stuff they bought is important if you would like return visits and customer referrals. Here are a few tricks for keeping everybody happy when you're not in control of the fulfillment yourself:

• Keep everybody informed: Set up a social media account; it doesn't matter where, though Twitter and Facebook are perennial favorites. Post notifications about delays and items with low inventory levels.
• Set up multiple reorder points: Make it easy for customers to place a sales order with you. Include product or category links with all your communications, and provide recent buyers with limited access to your public enterprise inventory management system to track their ordered products.
• Splurge on safety stock: Safety stock is the small number of in-demand items you're keeping on the shelf anyway, just in case. If you ever have an emergency, such as a surge in demand or a vendor that runs out of raw materials for the product you're selling, having a few extra to fill high-priority orders comes in handy.

Bringing It All Together

Smart business owners are always innovating. Whether you're covering for a temporary shortfall or experimenting with just-in-time delivery, backordering is a part of smart inventory management you can't do without.

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