I've been working on implementing a data feed for Google merchant center and after submitting it for the first time I noticed that Google's automatic update changed some of our items' availability from out of stock to in stock with this message:
Your product's availability status was automatically updated to match the data on your landing page.
A help article (https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6098259) explains that this is likely to occur due to a discrepancy between the data provided in the feed and structured data shown on the product page itself. It goes on to say:
Check your product data for those products (using the item ID), and make sure that each item has the same values for availability as is represented on your own site and in its structured data.
There is a problem here though since we use OnlineOnly in our structured data and this option is not valid in the merchant center feed. My best guess is that Google classifies OnlineOnly the same as in stock.
The items in question are items that we don't keep physical stock of, but like many online retailers these items are available directly from the supplier and fulfilled for orders as they are placed. We don't want to falsely claim that they are in stock, so originally OnlineOnly seemed like the best option for our structured data.
At this point I'm left with a few options that I can think of to resolve this:
- Change both values to
out of stock - Change both values to
in stock - Allow the discrepancy stand and let Google do as they see fit
Can anyone advise what is the most correct value for availability on both the feed and our structured data in this situation?
