Contact person: Business Client

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Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Budget: Recommended by industry experts

Time to start: As soon as possible

Project description:
"Goal

We need a technical solution to prevent Google Merchant Center from showing or flagging products that are sold out, while still maintaining compliance with Google’s feed requirements.

Recommended Solutions
1. Automatically exclude out-of-stock products from the feed

Update the feed generation logic or plugin settings to:

Exclude products where stock = 0
(in many feed plugins this option is labeled “Exclude out-of-stock products”)

This will ensure that Google never receives products without a valid price.

2. Use the correct ‘out_of_stock’ availability attribute

If we want to keep sold-out products visible for SEO or reference (e.g., “sold examples”), then:

Keep the <price> attribute populated with the last known price.

Add <availability>out_of_stock</availability> to those products in the feed.

Google accepts this as long as the price matches what’s shown on the product page.

3. Adjust the product page content

For unique, sold items, we can display:

“This item has been sold – check similar items below.”

This helps retain SEO traffic while the feed correctly marks the product as out of stock.

4. Implement dynamic feed cleanup

Add a script or rule that:

Removes any products with inventory = 0 from the Merchant feed,
or

Automatically updates their availability to out_of_stock instead of removing the price.

This keeps the feed dynamically synchronized with real inventory.

What NOT to do

Don’t leave the price field empty or set it to 0 — Google will reject it.

Don’t leave sold-out items marked as in_stock.

Don’t show a product page without a visible price if it’s in the Merchant feed.

Long-term recommendation

Because our products are unique, we can also:

Run Google Ads that link to category pages (e.g., “Handmade Moroccan Rugs”) instead of individual product pages.

This keeps ads active even when specific items sell out." (client-provided description)