If you’ve ever shopped online, you know the feeling. You find something you love and click through with excitement, just for it to be out of stock. For one of Cognizant’s clients, a youth-focused fashion retailer, this wasn’t just a minor inconvenience; it was a silent killer of visibility, conversions and revenue.
That’s when Abhijeet Kharsan and his team – Prashant Pachapole, Sagar Andre and Shubhi Chouksey, stepped in. After tracking the issue for some time, they submitted their solution through Bluebolt, Cognizant’s innovation platform that enables associates at all levels to submit ideas for potential implementation. Let’s hear more about this innovation from Abhijeet.
Our client was launching between 500 and 1,000 new products daily, but 85% of organic traffic from different search engines went to out-of-stock products. We could see that there wasn’t any product archival strategy, which resulted in the indexing of more than 1.2 million out-of-stock products, overshadowing the newly launched products.
As a result, customers grew frustrated, conversions reduced and their revenue was impacted. Above all, a youth-focused brand that launches hundreds of new products every day was perceived as stale.
We knew the problem was in the archival of out-of-stock products, and a traditional archival system would cost around $9 million and take 18 months to implement. But waiting that long would have led to a loss in revenue and market share. We needed a solution that was fast, safe and scalable. We began brainstorming: what can we do without building a new system?
That’s when it clicked.
We added a small flag to our product database to identify all out-of-stock products. We then wrote a piece of code to update this flag whenever the business confirmed a product was discontinued. Finally, we adjusted how our systems would respond when someone searched for these products. Instead of the usual “404 Not Found” page, we responded search engines with “410 Gone” and all these products were removed from indexing. Interestingly, we did this in a day at minimal cost.
The results of our innovation were impressive. We saw a 49% drop in outdated product pages indexed by search engines. New products began getting the visibility they deserved. Revenue increased by 8.6% in just eight weeks, translating into millions in annual profit. The sales that had been falling for multiple quarters started to rise again and the client attributed “newness” as a major factor in their revival.
“Cognizant’s Bluebolt ecosystem is much more than a platform for sharing innovative ideas. It gave us the space to experiment without waiting for the perfect conditions.”
We were humbled to win the Bluebolt Process Innovation Award at the company’s global 2025 Enspire Summit. Our win showed how small innovations can create a big impact. This will always be one of the projects I will look back on with pride.
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