At a glance
Catalogue product count grouped by availability (active / disabled / preorder). Tells you the operational state of your catalogue: how many products are live to customers, how many are hidden, how many are pre-orderable. Drift in this distribution often signals catalogue-management hygiene issues.
| What it counts | GROUP BY availability.keyword over every product in the BC catalogue. The availability field has three canonical values: available (live), disabled (hidden from storefront), preorder (orderable but not yet shipped). |
| VAT / tax treatment | n/a, catalogue metadata. |
| Shipping | n/a. |
| Discounts | n/a. |
| Refunds | n/a. |
| Cancelled / voided orders | n/a. |
| Currency | n/a. |
| Channels / sources | This is a catalogue-level count, but BC’s Channel Manager allows per-channel availability overrides. A product available at the catalogue level can be disabled on a specific channel. We count at the catalogue level by default; per-channel decomposition is on the V2 backlog. |
| The three states explained | available: customer can see and buy. The healthy default. disabled: hidden from storefront browse and search; direct URL still works. Used for OOS items, seasonal items off-season, and discontinued items. preorder: customer can order but the item ships at a later date; useful for pre-launch demand capture and back-in-stock pre-bookings. |
| Why disabled count matters | A growing disabled-product count is usually catalogue debt: items the merchandising team disabled instead of deleting. Each disabled product still consumes platform slots, file-library storage, and admin-page load time. Most stores accumulate 10-30% catalogue rot over 2-3 years if not actively pruned. |
| Preorder usage signal | Most BC stores show <2% preorder share. Stores actively using preorder (>5%) have figured out how to capture demand for delayed items, a sophisticated catalogue practice that lifts revenue without inventory risk. |
| B2B Edition | B2B-only catalogues often have higher disabled share because procurement-only SKUs are hidden from retail. Acceptable for hybrid stores; a B2B-only store with 50% disabled is functioning differently. |
| Time window | RT (real-time, refreshed each catalogue sync) |
| Alert trigger | None at this card. Pair with Inventory Alerts for stock-driven status changes. |
| Roles | owner, operations |
Calculation
Worked example
A US homewares brand on BigCommerce Pro with 4,820 active SKUs out of a larger catalogue, snapshot at 12 Apr 26.| Status | Product count | Share | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
available | 4,820 | 73.4% | Live to customers |
disabled | 1,680 | 25.6% | Hidden, mostly OOS or seasonal |
preorder | 65 | 1.0% | Pre-launch demand capture |
| Total catalogue | 6,565 | 100% |
- 25.6% disabled is high. Healthy disabled share is 5-15%. At 25.6% the catalogue carries a lot of dead weight; either OOS items waiting for restock (acceptable if temporary), seasonal items off-season (acceptable for fashion/holidays), or genuinely abandoned SKUs that should be archived (the catalogue rot pattern).
- Drilling the disabled bucket usually reveals 3 sub-segments. (a) Recent OOS waiting restock (50-70%): keep these, they’ll come back. (b) Seasonal off-season (15-30%): keep these, they’ll come back next year. (c) Abandoned / discontinued (10-20%): archive these, they’re not coming back.
- 1.0% preorder share is healthy. Most stores show <0.5% because they don’t proactively use preorder. A store using preorder for back-in-stock notifications and pre-launch capture sees 2-5%; this store at 1% is in mid-curve.
- The catalogue carries 6,565 products but only 4,820 (73.4%) are sellable. From a customer perspective the store has a 4,820-SKU range. From a merchandising perspective the team is managing 6,565. Pruning the abandoned 10-20% of disabled products simplifies operations without affecting customer experience.
- Per-channel availability creates hidden complexity. The headline
availablecount of 4,820 may mask that 200 of those are disabled on Amazon, 150 are disabled on B2B portal, etc. Channel-specific availability is a Channel Manager feature, audit it separately.
- Audit the disabled bucket quarterly. Sort by
dateModifieddescending; products disabled more than 18 months ago are candidates for archive. - Archive vs delete decision. Archive (BC has no native “archive” state, but
availability = disabled+ custom tag works) preserves URL history for SEO; delete loses URL and breaks any links. Default to archive; delete only if SEO history is irrelevant. - Use preorder more aggressively for restock-known items. When you know an OOS item ships in 14-28 days, switch from disabled to preorder; capture demand instead of losing it. Stores using preorder see 30-60% of would-be lost demand convert.
- Monitor the disabled-share trend. A growing share over months means catalogue management is falling behind; flat or shrinking is healthy housekeeping.
- For B2B + retail hybrid stores, audit per-channel availability. Hidden-on-retail-but-available-on-B2B is a legitimate state but should be intentional, not accidental.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Product Status |
|---|---|
| Inventory Alerts | Low-stock products often transition to disabled. The two cards together show stock-driven status changes. |
| BC Inventory Distribution | The stock-on-hand picture; combined with status shows OOS-but-still-listed gaps. |
| Products by Type | Type decomposition. Disabled share usually concentrates in 1-2 types. |
| Products by Vendor | Brand decomposition. Disabled share by brand reveals supplier-relationship issues. |
| Top Products | Top revenue products in disabled state are urgent. |
| Bottom Products | Tail-end. Most disabled items are bottom-tier; bottom-product cleanup overlaps with disabled cleanup. |
| Missing SEO Title Count | Catalogue-health peer. SEO gaps + disabled gaps cluster in the same bad-hygiene cohort. |
| BC Channel OOS per Channel | Per-channel OOS view. Disabled at catalogue level + OOS at channel level differ. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in BigCommerce Control Panel: Catalogue → Products supports a Visibility filter that mirrors this card’s distribution. The filter values are “Visible” (=available), “Not Visible” (= disabled), and “Preorder” (= preorder). Bulk operations on the disabled bucket are available from the catalogue view.
For per-channel availability, Channel Manager → channel → “Listings” tab shows products available on that channel; difference vs catalogue-level available count surfaces channel-specific overrides.
Why our number may legitimately differ from BC catalogue view:
| Reason | Direction |
|---|---|
Variant-level visibility. BC supports product-level and variant-level visibility. We aggregate at product level; variant-only-disabled products show as available here. | Vortex IQ HIGHER available count |
| Custom availability values. Some BC apps add custom states beyond the canonical three; we count them under “other”. | Mixed |
| Channel overrides. This card is catalogue-level. BC’s Channel Manager view is per-channel. The two should differ on multi-channel stores; the difference is the channel-override magnitude. | Different scope |
| Sync lag. Status changes propagate within 5-30 minutes. | Vortex IQ slightly LAGS |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
google_search_console.gsc_indexed_pages | Available products should be indexed; disabled products should not be (after Google re-crawl) | Sync timing: Google may take 7-30 days to de-index newly-disabled products. |
amazon_sp.amazon_listing_status | Amazon-side listing status correlates with this card’s available slice | Channel Manager may publish to Amazon with different rules; a product available at catalogue may be inactive on Amazon. |
shopify.product_status(planned)adobe_commerce.product_status(planned)
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
My disabled share is 30%, is that a problem? Likely. Healthy is 5-15%. At 30% the catalogue carries operational debt: storage, admin-page load, sync overhead. Run a quarterly cleanup to archive items disabled more than 18 months. Keep recently-disabled (OOS, off-season) items. Should I delete disabled products or keep them? Default to keep (disabled, not deleted). Deletion loses the URL, breaking inbound links and SEO history. Disabled preserves the URL and lets you re-enable later. Only delete when the product is genuinely never coming back AND has no inbound link value. Why is my preorder share so low? Most stores don’t proactively use preorder. The mechanism is a missed opportunity: when a popular item runs OOS with a known restock date, switching from disabled to preorder captures demand. Customers commit to preorder at 50-80% of in-stock conversion, materially better than just being told “out of stock”. Can I bulk-disable products via API? Yes. The PUT/catalog/products/{id} endpoint accepts availability. Bulk-update via API takes 5-15 minutes for 100-500 products. Always backup first; bulk operations are hard to reverse precisely.
My theme shows “out of stock” overlays on disabled products, why?
Theme-side override. Some Stencil themes treat availability = disabled AND inventoryLevel = 0 as “show with OOS overlay” rather than hide. Audit your theme’s _show_product logic if this is a concern.
Should disabled products appear in marketplace feeds?
No. BC’s Channel Manager filters disabled products out of marketplace feeds by default. If they’re showing on Amazon / Google Shopping, the channel-specific availability override is wrong; check Channel Manager → channel → product list.
My catalogue grew from 5K to 6.5K products in a year, but disabled grew from 500 to 1,680, what changed?
Catalogue accretion outpacing pruning. Common pattern: merchandising team adds new SKUs faster than they archive old ones. The right intervention is a “every Q1 prune” cycle: archive anything disabled more than 12 months at the start of each year.
My B2B-only catalogue has 80% disabled (only retail-public items show as available), is that right?
For a hybrid retail+B2B store with private B2B catalogue, yes. The “available” share reflects retail-visible items; B2B-only items are intentionally disabled for retail. Audit Channel Manager to confirm; if your B2B-only items are accidentally hidden from the B2B portal too, the configuration is broken.
Does disabled affect SEO?
Eventually yes. Once Google re-crawls and sees the disabled URL returns 404 or noindex, it drops from index. The lag is typically 7-30 days. For SEO-significant disabled products (high-traffic historical URLs), set up 301 redirects to relevant alternatives instead of leaving them disabled.
Can I see the disabled product list filtered by category?
Yes from BC Catalogue → Products with combined Visibility + Category filter. The bulk-action UI from there lets you re-enable, archive, or delete in batches.