Removing Out of Stock products from the feed

Hello @goardo,

Yes you can get the feed without the out of stock products with the filter function in our Premium plugin. But it is perfectly fine to have out of stock products in your feed as long as they are marked as “out of stock” Is that not the case in your feed?

Hi there,

The feed is showing ‘out of stock’ products yes. How is this okay, when Google are flagging it as an issue? The issue I believe is that when we have an out of stock product on our site, the BUY button no longer shows as the product is not purchasable.

So, if we leave out of stock products in the feed, they get sent to Google Merchant Centre and an ad is created… because people can’t purchase an out of stock product and because there is no buy button on the final landing page from the ad, it is not perfectly fine to have these in our feed as it goes against Google policies.

Does that make sense?

I think our only option is to invest in the premium plugin if this is not doable in the free version.

Many thanks for your response. Much appreciated.

What is the error message what you get in your Merchant center?

I couldn’t tell you the exact error without going through all the process again and trying to get it to break.

The error message was pointing to a specific landing page. When I checked out the offending landing page, it related to an out of stock product and as a result, when reading through Googles policies that I was directed toward, it states clearly that there must be a clear image, a clear BUY button so people can purchase and there was no BUY button or ADD TO CART button on that page. It was my assumption that this was part of the issue.

Google are not more specific to the actual error other than what I’ve told you. Hope this helps.

OK, yes that is clear.
It is best practise to keep out of stock products in your feed. This because you do not have to process them again when they become available again.

Out of stock product should not get in your ads as Google understand that they are out of stock. There is a chance they do get in the advertisements when on the webshop microdata is telling Google differently.

So in order to help you out, we should know exactly what the error is that the product is rejected.

Nevertheless, with the premium version, you are able to remove certain products from the feed. That could be very helpful if you want to remove products that for instance are not converting as good as you would like to see or have a bad ROI.

Hello @goardo,

Do you still need help with this?
Let me know if you do!

Hi @aukejomm,

This is an ongoing issue which still remains unresolved. At the moment, we are still trying to get our product feed approved though I have not revisited it since posting due to other work commitments. So would like to come back to you in order to give you the exact error detail, so will do my best to do so. If you wouldn’t mind leaving this thread open, I will send further detail as soon as I am able.

Many thanks

Hello @goardo,

The thing is that Google should remove products out of stock within 24 hours.
So You have to investigate why this is not the case in your account. If you contact Google support I am sure it will make things very clear what is causing this without takin much time.

If only it were that simple, we would have had shopping ads live weeks ago. Part of the problem is that the last time I checked, Googles phone lines were down and they were not offering customer support in this way due to impact from the virus.

This is the first time we’ve set up shopping ads, and it has been so unbelievably difficult to get anything approved. We just don’t fully understand why it’s been such a headache. It’s a perfectly straightforward shop that we are creating the feed from.

Thank you for your time so far. Much appreicated.