Items out of stock and sold out items
Dan Macarie avatar
Written by Dan Macarie
Updated over a week ago

As a built-in default feature – if a product is out of stock, or marked as sold-out/unavailable in the implementation or blacklisted in the Nosto admin panel, Nosto won’t feature that product in recommendations.

Technically marking a product being OutOfStock in the availability data-field automatically removes a product from Nosto’s recommendations. Value in availability field should therefore always match the actual availability of a product in an online store. Value changes automatically when a page is loaded unsuccessfully for the first time. The update process takes from a few seconds up to a few minutes. When a product is again available in a store, and an updated product page is loaded for the first time, data value for availability changes in Nosto’s end and the product is marked as being InStock, which re-enables recommendations for the product. Manual input to exclude or include products from Nosto’s recommendations is therefore never needed.

Debugging availability issues

If a product is sold out, or for other reasons is marked as discontinued/sold-out/unavailable, we won’t include them to recommendations, but the detail needs to be mapped to Nosto accordingly. In a case a sold-out product still appears after few minutes it has been sold out, there is most likely a glitch in the implementation and the availability status is not updated for Nosto properly.

Use debug-tool to review the status of product’s availability mapped inside <availability>. If the value is still InStock, Nosto treats the item as available. Consult your site administrator about how to fix the implementation.

In case a removed product still appears in recommendations after few minutes, this is most likely because the changed availability detail hasn’t been updated to Nosto. Simply clicking a recommendation where a removed product still appears will initiate an update process, which removes a product automatically. As an additional method, using debug-toolbar and initiating a recrawl process manually should remove the product in next few seconds or minutes.

If this still doesn’t help, the issue is most likely related to the product update process and Nosto’s bot doesn’t receive the same details the browser sends. Go to Browse products menu and search the product by ID. In case the values differ from values available in debug-tool or details are missing, most likely the issue is that tagging is altered by using scripts, which the crawler-bot doesn’t execute. Also the site might return different values for the bot based on visitor’s geographical position and IP-address.

Enhancing the update process

All our official connectors leverage our product API to ensure that changes in pricing or availability are reflected instantaneously. The same API is available is available for use if you'd like to leverage it.

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