This paper presents the significant problem of so called shelf-warmers in the environment of electronic commerce. In the first part of the paper, the factors that have led to an increasing stock of shelf-warmers in online stores are discussed. These factors are divided into two groups: those that occur mainly in an online store environment and those not specifically associated with an online environment. One group of factors are related to the large number of items offered in an online store enabled by various models of inventory management (e.g. drop-shipping, 3PL, 4PL), the lack of a need to maintain costly space for the exposition of goods, the heterogeneity of online shoppers and the large number of returns from customers. The other group of factors concern incorrect forecasts of demand, inappropriate inventory control, choice of product assortment, pricing policies and the end of a product’s life cycle. The problem of appropriately identifying shelf-warmers is then discussed and an index measuring the tendency of a good to be a shelf-warmer is proposed. Based on this, different methods for dealing with shelf-warmers are outlined in the form of the use of recommendation systems, search engine optimization and social media. The paper then presents an experiment conducted in a real business environment to assess the effectiveness of some of the aforementioned methods. This experiment resulted in the sale of approximately 33% of 160 selected shelf-warmers and over 50% from one group (number 8) where all the suggestions were implemented, within a period of 10 months. The results obtained show that the methods and recommendations proposed may help online stores to deal with the problem of shelf-warmers.

中文翻译：

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电子商务中的搁架柜问题：建议的解决方案

本文提出了在电子商务环境中所谓的货架保温器的重大问题。在本文的第一部分中，讨论了导致在线商店的货架保温器库存增加的因素。这些因素分为两类：主要在在线商店环境中发生的因素和与在线环境没有特定关联的因素。一组因素与通过各种库存管理模式（例如，直接下运，3PL，4PL）在网上商店中提供的大量商品，缺乏维护昂贵的商品展示空间，在线购物者的异质性和来自客户的大量回报。另一组因素涉及需求预测不正确，库存控制不当，产品种类的选择，定价政策和产品生命周期的结束。然后讨论了适当地识别架子加热器的问题，并提出了一种衡量商品成为架子加热器的趋势的指标。基于此，以推荐系统，搜索引擎优化和社交媒体的形式概述了应对货架取暖器的不同方法。然后，本文提出了在真实商业环境中进行的实验，以评估上述某些方法的有效性。此实验在10个月内售出了160种精选的取暖器中的约33％，并在实施了所有建议的一组（第8个）中售出了50％以上。