Google Shopping Availability Attribute: Requirements, Values & Best Practices

What is the availability attribute?

The availability attribute communicates the current stock status of your product to Google. It has exactly four accepted values: in_stock, out_of_stock, preorder, and backorder. Google uses this attribute to determine ad eligibility, influence impression priority, surface availability information to shoppers, and power audience segmentation for Dynamic Remarketing.

Availability accuracy is one of the most operationally demanding aspects of feed management because stock status can change multiple times per day for high-velocity inventory. An availability mismatch — where your feed says in_stock but the product is actually unavailable — is one of the most expensive mistakes in Google Shopping: it generates clicks (charged to your budget) that land on an OOS product page, producing zero conversions while actively burning spend. The solution is a high-frequency availability update strategy, typically via supplemental feeds.

Technical specifications

Where it displays

• Shopping Ads — Google uses availability to determine ad eligibility. In-stock products receive full impression priority. Out-of-stock products are typically deprioritized or excluded from Shopping ads (though they may appear in some formats). Preorder and backorder products may show with availability context text depending on the ad format. Inaccurate availability damages user experience when shoppers click through to OOS products.

• Free Product Listings — The Shopping tab includes an “In stock” filter that shoppers can apply. Only products with availability=in_stock appear in filtered results. Products with other availability statuses are excluded from in-stock filtered views, reducing their visibility to ready-to-buy shoppers.

• Dynamic Remarketing — Availability status is a key signal in Dynamic Remarketing audience logic. Google can exclude OOS products from remarketing ad creatives automatically — users who viewed a product that’s now OOS won’t be shown that product in retargeting ads (preventing a frustrating user experience). This requires accurate, up-to-date availability data.

• Performance Max — In Performance Max campaigns with product feeds, availability is used to determine which products are eligible to appear in Shopping formats. OOS products are automatically deprioritized, but accurate data ensures the system doesn’t waste budget on them.

Rules

• Only the four accepted values are valid — Any other value (e.g., “available”, “yes”, “true”, “1”, “limited”) will cause a feed error. Use exactly: in_stock, out_of_stock, preorder, backorder.

• Must match landing page availability — Google crawls product pages to verify availability status. If the page shows “Out of Stock” but the feed says in_stock, a mismatch is flagged. Sustained mismatches result in disapproval.

• Preorder requires availability_date — When submitting preorder, also submit availability_date with the expected ship date in ISO 8601 format. Without it, the preorder context is incomplete and the benefit of the preorder designation is lost.

• Do not remove OOS products from the feed — Keep them with out_of_stock status. Removal causes the product’s history to be lost. Instead, exclude OOS products from campaigns using product group filters in Google Ads.

Best practices

Supplemental feed for real-time availability

The most impactful operational improvement for availability accuracy is a dedicated supplemental feed containing only availability data, refreshed frequently:

• Main feed: full product data, refreshed daily

• Supplemental feed: just id + availability (+ price if prices also change frequently), refreshed every 15–60 minutes

This supplemental feed approach means your availability data propagates to Google Merchant Center within 15–30 minutes of a stock change on your site — far faster than waiting for a full daily feed rebuild.

Campaign-level availability management in Google Ads

Even with accurate feed availability, implement campaign-level guards:

• Create a product group for OOS products in Shopping campaigns and set bid to 0 or exclude the group

• Use inventory filter rules to automatically exclude products with availability != in_stock from your active ad groups

• For Performance Max, Google handles OOS deprioritization automatically, but explicit feed accuracy is still essential

Availability status decision guide

Impact on performance

• Wasted ad spend on OOS products — This is the most direct and measurable impact. Every click on an OOS product that was incorrectly marked in_stock is 100% wasted spend with 0% conversion potential. For accounts with large, fast-moving catalogs, availability lag can waste thousands of euros per month in misattributed clicks.

• Landing page quality signals — High bounce rates from OOS product clicks send negative landing page quality signals to Google. Over time, systematically poor landing page engagement on clicked products can increase effective CPCs across the account as Google factors this into Quality Score calculations.

• Shopper trust — Shoppers who click a Shopping ad expecting an in-stock product and find it’s unavailable associate that negative experience with your brand, not just with Google. Repeat occurrences result in lost customer lifetime value beyond the immediate wasted click cost.

• Remarketing precision — Accurate availability enables Dynamic Remarketing to automatically exclude OOS products from retargeting creatives. This keeps your remarketing ads showing only products people can actually buy — improving CTR and conversion rate on retargeting audiences.

Common mistakes

• Using non-standard values like “available”, “yes”, “true”, or “1” instead of the exact accepted values

• Removing OOS products from the feed entirely instead of marking them as out_of_stock

• Relying solely on the daily feed refresh for availability updates in a high-velocity inventory environment

• Using in_stock for pre-launch products that aren’t yet purchasable — use preorder instead

• Using preorder without availability_date, leaving shoppers without context on when the product will be available

• Not pausing or excluding OOS products from Shopping campaigns even after the feed correctly marks them OOS

• Failing to reactivate products in campaigns promptly after restocking — leaving restocked products excluded from bidding

Pro tips

• Use a GCS supplemental feed for 30-minute availability sync — Host a lightweight CSV on Google Cloud Storage with just id, price, availability, and sale_price. Set Merchant Center to fetch it every 30 minutes. This is the single most effective way to keep availability accurate — your primary feed might update once per day, but the GCS supplemental catches stock changes within half an hour. Register it as highest-priority in Data Sources → Default Rule.

• Build an inventory webhook to feed trigger — If your e-commerce platform supports webhooks for inventory events (stock dropped to zero, product restocked), use these to trigger a supplemental feed regeneration immediately rather than waiting for a scheduled refresh. An availability update within 5 minutes of a stock-out prevents almost all OOS traffic waste.

• Segment your campaign reporting by availability changes — Track dates when products went OOS in your feed and cross-reference with conversion data. This lets you quantify exactly how much budget was wasted on OOS products in past periods, building a business case for investing in faster feed refresh infrastructure.

• Use preorder strategically for demand signaling — Activating Shopping ads for upcoming products with preorder status before launch generates early demand data, builds remarketing audiences of interested shoppers, and captures early purchasers — all before inventory is even in stock. This is especially valuable for seasonal products and new product launches.

• Implement availability structured data on all product pages — Add Schema.org availability markup using the correct schema.org values (InStock, OutOfStock, PreOrder, BackOrder) to your product pages. This helps Google’s crawler verify your feed availability data faster and with more confidence, reducing false-positive mismatch flags during feed update windows.