How to fix it
- Set a policy for how long a product stays published after going out of stock, and automate it.
- For seasonal items that will return, keep the page but mark availability honestly so the agent can say 'back soon' rather than 'available'.
- For discontinued items, unpublish and redirect to the closest live product.
Why an agent cares
An agent that surfaces your product and sends a buyer to a dead page has been made to look incompetent by your catalogue. Retrieval systems that track outcomes will discount a source that does this repeatedly.
Permanently out-of-stock products also dilute the catalogue. They compete for retrieval with items you can actually sell, and they inflate the apparent size of your range.
A small share is normal and unavoidable. A large share suggests products are never being retired.
Check your own store
This check runs as part of a full audit, alongside 18 others. Nothing to install.
Other trust checks
Supplier boilerplate left in descriptionsPhrases like 'Dear customer, please allow 1-3cm measurement error' identify the listing as an unedited dropship import.No real brand per productUsing the store name as the vendor on every product removes the field an agent uses to group and trust your catalogue.Products with no categoryAn uncategorised product is hard to place in a comparison set.Variants without SKUsA variant with no SKU is hard to reference unambiguously.Products with no imageAn imageless product is usually an incomplete one, and it is treated that way.