Out of Stock or Discontinued: What Your Product Page Should Tell Customers and Google

Picture a supermarket shelf where the product has run out, but the price tag is still stuck in the same spot. A shopper walks up and finds only a gap. Nobody says whether it is out for a few days or gone for good. There is no sign saying when more will arrive, and no arrow pointing to a similar item on the next shelf. They walk away wondering whether the shop still sells it at all.

Out-of-stock product pages on a website often have the same problem. The page is still there, the price is still showing, and the order button still works. Or the page has quietly disappeared with no explanation. In this article I will go through the situations one at a time: what the product page should tell the customer, and which availability statuses Google lists in its documentation. I will not cover moving pages or site-wide redirects, because another article already does, and I will not cover overselling either.

Try it on your own out-of-stock product page

Pick one product you do not have right now. Open its page on your phone and ask yourself five questions. Does the page say plainly that it is out? Can the order button still be pressed? Does it say when the item will return, or that it will not return? Is there a similar product the customer can go to next? And can the customer leave a request so you tell them when it is back?

If you answered no to three or more, that page is letting customers walk away without knowing what to do next. The fix is usually a few lines of text.

What Google's documentation says about availability

Google's structured data documentation for merchant listings lists several availability values a shop can declare. As far as I could count on that page, they are BackOrder, Discontinued, InStock, InStoreOnly, LimitedAvailability, OnlineOnly, OutOfStock, PreOrder, PreSale and SoldOut, and the short form without the URL prefix is supported. I cannot confirm that this list is complete, because the page is very long and I could only read part of it. For OutOfStock, the documentation says it means the product is out of stock right now, and it asks you not to give more than one availability value per product.

Two cautions. First, I read only the list of values and the sentences I have quoted, not the full definition of every value. So the matching of values to situations in the next section is my interpretation based on the meaning of each name, and your web team should check it against the schema.org definitions before using it. Second, this page explains how a shop declares its status, but I did not read anything about how Google shows that status to users in Thailand, so I cannot promise any result in search. What I can say clearly is that when the page and the declared data agree, customers who land on the page are better served.

Matching your situation to what the page should say

Temporarily out, and you know when it returns

This is the most common case. The page should say clearly that the item is temporarily out, give the expected restock date if you know it, and turn the order button into a way to leave a notification request or message you on chat. The status that fits best is OutOfStock. If you take pre-orders while waiting for stock, BackOrder fits better, and you should also tell the customer how long the wait will be.

Taking reservations before the real launch

If the product is not in stock yet but you accept reservations, the page should give the expected shipping date and the terms, for example whether a deposit or full payment is needed. The status that fits is PreOrder. The important thing is not to let the page look as if the item ships immediately, because the customer will expect the wrong delivery time.

Genuinely low stock

The LimitedAvailability value is for when stock really is low. If you show low stock just to push people into buying while you actually have plenty, that is pressuring the customer, and it goes against the principle I follow in everything I write. So I recommend using it only when the real stock number is below a threshold you have set.

Discontinued or permanently stopped

The Discontinued value signals that the product has been ended. For the customer, the page should say plainly that it is no longer sold, with a link to a replacement model or a similar product. If there is no replacement, link to the category the product used to sit in. Leaving a customer on an unexplained 404 page loses more than having a page that tells the truth.

Small-run items that have sold out

For items made in a fixed quantity that have sold out and will not be made again, SoldOut fits better than OutOfStock, because it does not suggest the item is coming back. The page can stay as a record of that edition and invite customers to follow the next one.

Online only or in-store only

If some products are sold only on the website or only at the physical shop, Google's documentation has the values OnlineOnly and InStoreOnly for that. The page should likewise tell customers plainly which channel they can order through.

Products with options: one size is out, another is in

Google's page on structured data for e-commerce says Product and ProductGroup are used to describe products and their variants. From the customer's side, what you want is to show the status of each option separately, for example size M out but size L available, instead of marking the whole page as all out or all in. I did not read the full details of how option-level status is declared, so I leave it to the web team to confirm the method, but the principle that the page and the data should match always applies.

I do not dispute that hiding out-of-stock items makes a shop look tidier

Many shops hide out-of-stock products from the listing pages because they do not want the shop to look empty or unpopular. I understand that, and in some cases it is the right call, for example for products discontinued long ago. The side effect to know about is that customers who saved the old link, or who find the product through search, will land on a page that has vanished without explanation. If you choose to hide or delete a page, talk to your web team about where the old link should go. I wrote about the effect of broken links in my article on broken links on a website.

As for whether you should keep or delete the page of a permanently discontinued product, I have not read a Google document that settles that directly, so I will not give a firm answer. My own rule of thumb: if people still visit the page or links still point to it, keep the page with the status and alternatives. If nobody visits and no links point to it any more, then decide about deleting it with your web team.

"If I say it is out, the customer will buy elsewhere anyway"

True, some will go no matter how the page is written. But compare two pages. In the first, the customer places an order and only later hears that the item is out. They feel let down and may not come back. In the second, the page says so plainly, lets them leave a phone number or add your shop on LINE to be told when it arrives, and shows similar products. At least the customer has options and a reason to return.

If you collect phone numbers or emails for restock alerts, tell customers clearly what you will use the data for, and use it only for that. I am not an expert in personal data law, so I suggest checking your shop's consent terms before turning this feature on.

Why it pays to set up a status system now

The trouble with product status is usually not on the web page itself but in the real stock and the web page not matching. If you still update stock by hand, the more products you have, the easier it is for things to slip. If you decide the method while you have only a few dozen products, such as who updates, when, and whether it can connect to your back-office system, you will not have to start over when the shop grows. I wrote about connecting a shop system to a website in my article on connecting a POS or shop system to your website.

The smallest version you can start this week

You do not need to fix the whole shop at once. Pick five products that are out or discontinued right now. On each product page, state the status in one plain line, turn off any order button that cannot really be used, add a link to a similar product, and set up one way for customers to ask to be notified. That alone removes a lot of the pages that leave customers confused.

Examples you can look at yourself

Open the Google merchant listing documentation linked in this article, go to the availability section, and read the list yourself. Then open an out-of-stock product page on a large online shop you know, and notice what it tells the customer and what options it gives them next. I will not name any shop as a right or wrong example, because I did not check those shops' actual pages for this article.

About evidence from real shops

I have no figures for this article showing how much clearer product status raises sales or reduces chat questions, in any shop I can talk about, and I will not make numbers up. What I can point to is the Google documentation linked above, where I read the list of status values and the instruction to give a single value. The matching of situations to statuses, and the principle that the page should agree with the declared data, are opinions from our own work.

A 6-step plan for managing product status

1. Go through the products that are out or discontinued now, and sort them into temporarily out, pre-order, low stock, permanently discontinued and permanently sold out.

2. Write one line on each product page that matches the status, with the expected restock date if you know it.

3. Turn off any order button that cannot really be used, or change it into a notification request button.

4. Add a link to a similar product or the original category, especially for permanently discontinued items.

5. Ask your web team to confirm how to declare the status so it matches the page, with one value per product, and per option if there are several sizes or colours.

6. Decide who is responsible for updating the status, and agree when to update after a sell-out or a restock.

How to tell whether your out-of-stock pages are working better

Count two things each month. First, whether questions like "is this in stock?" or "when will it be back?" in your chat are going down. Second, if you have web analytics, whether more people who open an out-of-stock page go on to another page of your shop instead of leaving the site. Better numbers mean the page is starting to move customers along instead of leaving them stuck at an empty shelf. For the other pages a business website should have, I summarised them in my article on the 10 essential components of a business website.

Questions to ask your web team before fixing out-of-stock pages

Before you start, try asking your web team or provider these four questions. First, does the system you use support more availability statuses than "in stock" and "out", such as pre-order or discontinued? Second, when stock reaches zero, does the system turn off the order button automatically, or does each page have to be edited by hand? Third, are the text on the page and the data declared for Google drawn from the same source? If you fix one and the other does not follow, the two will contradict each other. Fourth, for product pages that have been hidden or deleted, where does the old link go?

The answers will tell you whether the shop needs manual fixes, extra settings or a change of system. I suggest writing the answers down before you pay for anything, because the cost of a fix depends on what the current system can already do, and I do not have information about your shop's system, so I cannot give you a figure.

A note on the wording you use on product pages

The words that state the status should be direct, such as "temporarily out, expected back at the end of this month" or "no longer sold". Do not present a date as certain when you are not sure of it. If you do not know when stock will arrive, write that the date is not yet known, and say how you will tell customers once you do, because a missed date damages trust faster than saying you do not know yet. And do not use wording that pressures customers to decide fast, such as "last one left", if the real number is not that.

Closing thoughts

An empty shelf is not the supermarket's problem. The problem is an empty shelf with no sign on it. A sold-out product page is the same: simply telling customers plainly what happened and what they can do next turns a dead end into a fork in the road.

If your current website cannot set product status this way, or you are thinking of building an online shop that connects stock to product pages, take a look at our website packages and see whether they suit your shop. Or message me and tell me how your out-of-stock pages look today.

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