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Stockout

A stockout is the moment a product runs out of stock and the store cannot sell it, even to shoppers who want it, until it is restocked.

How it works

A shopper who finds a product sold out buys a substitute, buys elsewhere, waits or gives up. The store loses part of those sales, and its sales history understates demand.

The feed tells Google about stock through the availability attribute. In Google Ads, a product marked out of stock carries an “out of stock” entry among its issues, which affect whether it can show in ads. If the feed says in stock but the product page does not, Merchant Center flags an availability mismatch.

In a GetProfit count of 400,000 catalogue products with issues, 209,328 carried the “out of stock” entry. The count is not a random sample, and such issues cluster in a few very large catalogues.

Stockout cost works out what a sold-out bestseller costs a store running Google Ads.

Formula

Revenue not booked ≈ the product’s average daily revenue before the stockout × days out of stock

Where you see it

  • Merchant Center: each product’s availability value, such as in stock, out of stock, preorder or backorder.
  • The portal’s products screen keeps a separate list of products that dropped out of impressions: the reason, how many days they have been out and how much revenue that costs per month.

Example

Example store, not client data.

In the four weeks before it ran out, the tableware shop’s best-selling dinner set sold one a day at 600. It stayed out of stock for 12 days: 600 × 12 = 7,200 of revenue not booked, or 4% of the shop’s 180,000 a month.

Not to be confused with

  • Dead stock — the opposite problem: goods that do not sell and tie up money.
  • Disapproved products — rejected by Merchant Center over their data or a policy. A stockout is fixed by restocking and then updating availability, not by correcting the product data.

Right and wrong readings

  • Wrong: “The set sold nothing for 12 days, so demand for it fell.” Right: a product that cannot be bought has no sales by definition, so those days say nothing about demand.
  • Wrong: “We lost exactly 7,200.” Right: the figure is an estimate, because some shoppers took another set or came back after the restock.

Sources

  • Stockout (Wikipedia) — definition; shopper responses; substitution hides true demand. Checked 2 October 2026.
  • ProductAttributes (Merchant API) — values of the availability attribute. Checked 2 October 2026.
  • Product issues (Content API for Shopping, sunset 18 August 2026) — the availability mismatch issue. Checked 2 October 2026.
  • ShoppingProduct (Google Ads API) — the list of issues affecting whether a product can show in ads. Checked 2 October 2026.
  • GetProfit data: 400,000 catalogue products with Merchant Center flags (the first 400,000 rows of the catalogue table, not a random sample), catalogue snapshot of August 2026; issue code not_eligible_out_of_stock.