Availability, submitted as <g:availability> in Google Merchant Center feeds and availability in Meta Catalog, tells shopping platforms whether an item can currently be purchased. Google accepts four values -- in_stock, out_of_stock, preorder, and backorder -- while Meta Catalog uses a similar but not identical set, including in stock, out of stock, available for order, and discontinued.

Why It Matters

Availability is one of the fields Google and Meta actively verify against the live landing page, and a feed reporting in_stock for an item that's actually sold out is a direct path to wasted ad spend, since shoppers click through to a page they can't buy from and the platform may eventually disapprove the item or the whole domain for repeat mismatches. Beyond compliance, availability is the single biggest lever for protecting return on ad spend without touching bids or creative at all -- pausing spend on out-of-stock items automatically, rather than discovering the mismatch days later in a performance report, is the difference between a feed that reacts to inventory management systems and one that lags behind them. This exact dynamic is the basis of how Vivense lifted ROAS 32% by not advertising products it couldn't sell, where correcting availability data alone drove the majority of the gain.

How It Works

Google requires availability on every item and disapproves listings where it's missing or where the value doesn't match one of the four accepted strings, submitted in lowercase with underscores. When availability is set to preorder or backorder, Google also expects a corresponding availability_date to be present so it knows when the item will actually ship, and Merchant Center will flag the combination as incomplete without it. Meta Catalog's values differ slightly in formatting -- spaces rather than underscores, and an additional discontinued state Google has no direct equivalent for -- so a single feed pushed unmodified to both channels typically needs a mapping layer to translate Google's in_stock into Meta's in-stock value and reconcile the extra discontinued case. Retailers running the same catalog into both platforms should treat this translation as a required transformation step rather than an edge case, since a raw pass-through feed will get one channel's values silently rejected.

Example

<item>
  <g:id>SKU-64301</g:id>
  <title>Insulated Travel Mug - 20oz</title>
  <link>https://example-shop.com/products/travel-mug-20oz</link>
  <g:price>22.00 USD</g:price>
  <g:availability>out_of_stock</g:availability>
  <g:condition>new</g:condition>
</item>

Related Concepts

Availability pairs directly with availability date whenever an item is on preorder or backorder, since one field states the status and the other states when that status changes, and it's worth checking alongside condition since used or discontinued stock often needs its own availability logic separate from new inventory. At its core, availability is only as accurate as the inventory management system feeding it, which is why most availability-related ad waste traces back to a sync delay rather than a feed formatting mistake.