> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.get-ryze.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Out-of-stock products

> How to handle out-of-stock and discontinued products without losing rankings: keep temporary pages live, redirect permanent removals, never mass-delete.

The decision depends entirely on whether the product is coming back.

| situation                                        | action                                            |
| ------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------- |
| **Temporarily out of stock**                     | Keep the page live, return 200, mark `OutOfStock` |
| **Permanently discontinued, replacement exists** | 301 to the replacement                            |
| **Permanently discontinued, no replacement**     | 301 to the parent category, or 410                |
| **Seasonal, returning**                          | Keep the page live year-round                     |
| **Never launched**                               | 404 or 410                                        |

## Temporarily out of stock: keep the page

Deleting a page that has accumulated rankings, links, and citation history throws that away — and you will need it again in three weeks.

* Return **200**, not 404
* Set `availability` to `https://schema.org/OutOfStock` in structured data — accurate markup matters more than optimistic markup
* State restock timing if you know it
* Offer alternatives on the page, and a back-in-stock notification
* Keep the page in the sitemap and keep linking to it

The page continues to rank and continues to capture demand.

## Permanently discontinued: redirect

301 to the closest genuine equivalent. Where none exists, the parent category is a better destination than the homepage.

**Do not mass-redirect discontinued products to the homepage.** Google treats an irrelevant redirect destination as a soft 404, so the value is not passed and you gain nothing over a 404.

Use `410 Gone` where the product is permanently gone and there is genuinely nothing relevant. It is a clearer signal than 404 and speeds removal.

## Soft 404s: the silent failure

A soft 404 is a page returning 200 with no real content — an empty product page, or a category with nothing in it.

These accumulate on stores that remove products by emptying the page rather than deleting or redirecting it. They waste [crawl budget](/concepts/crawl-budget) and are reported in Search Console → Pages.

## What not to do

* **Do not delete products in bulk without redirects.** This is the most common cause of unexplained traffic loss after a catalogue clean-up.
* **Do not `noindex` temporarily out-of-stock products.** Recovery after reindexing takes far longer than the stockout.
* **Do not leave `InStock` markup on unavailable products.** It misleads shopping surfaces and agents, and damages feed trust.
* **Do not redirect a temporary stockout.** You lose the page and have to rebuild it.

## Structured data

```json theme={null}
"offers": {
  "@type": "Offer",
  "price": "149.00",
  "priceCurrency": "GBP",
  "availability": "https://schema.org/OutOfStock"
}
```

Accurate availability is more valuable than a permanently optimistic `InStock`, particularly for [agentic commerce](/concepts/agentic-commerce), where stale availability causes silent exclusion.

## Related

* [URL redirects and migrations](/shopify/redirects)
* [Product structured data on Shopify](/shopify/product-schema)