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Reasons why the issue is happening
One or more of your products show as unavailable for purchase at checkout even though they’re displayed as being in stock on your landing pages.
It’s a bad customer experience if product availability changes from “in stock” on the landing page to “out of stock” or “unavailable” after the product has been added to a cart, and customers will be less likely to try and purchase from your store in the future.
By submitting consistent availability information on your landing pages and throughout the entire checkout process, you ensure that online customers have a great experience on your website.
You should’ve received an email asking you to update your availability status by a certain date so that the values are consistent throughout your website (on the landing pages and during the checkout process).
Common reasons for checkout availability mismatch
- Use of IP detection / geolocation. Don’t change the availability of your product based on a user’s location. If you only target certain locations within a country, use regional pricing and availability or exclude this region in your shipping settings.
- Non-functional buy button. The product appears to be available on the landing page, but after pressing the buy button, it shows as out of stock or unavailable.
- Product cannot be shipped to a home address. During checkout, after providing the shipping address, the product is no longer available and cannot be directly delivered to a user’s doorstep, excluding PO Boxes. If you have a product that's only available for in-store pickup or that ships to a pick-up point, check the shipping cost guidelines to see whether these options are allowed in your target country. Otherwise, ensure your product is excluded from online offers by using the excluded destination
[excluded_destination]attribute. Alternatively, you may consider trying local inventory ads. - Products are not available to check out within the entire target country. If you sell products that are only available in some of the regions of the target country, check to see whether regional availability and pricing is available in your target country. If there are fixed regions within a country where you do not sell or ship any products, you may be able to exclude this region in your shipping settings. In this case, ensure all shipping services have the same configuration to exclude this region.
- Product is not showing a consistent availability across the landing page, checkout page, and your data source. The availability of all of your products needs to match across all three. A mismatch in one of these will trigger a product disapproval.
How to fix this issue
This section provides next steps for fixing your availability issues.
Step 1: Ensure that products available on your landing pages can be checked out and delivered to home addresses
Investigate your website’s checkout process to identify any reasons why a product would become unavailable past the landing page.
- Check the warning email for examples of products that are affected. Look for a common problem on your website that could cause these availability mismatches.
- Review the availability status you display on the product landing pages with the one you display at checkout.
Step 2: Resubmit your product data
After you’ve fixed the issue and updated your product data, resubmit it using one of these methods:
If your Merchant Center product data is accurate, you don’t need to resubmit it before requesting a review.
Step 3: Request a review
If your account or product gets disapproved you can either fix the problem and request a review, or disagree with the issue and request a review. There may be additional steps you can take, such as verification options, depending on the issue.
If the review is successful, your issue will disappear. In some cases, there's a limit on how many reviews you can request. This limit will be specified.
If the disapproval remains and you’re uncertain with how to proceed, contact us for support.