At a glance
The store-wide count of BigCommerce catalogue products with zero or negative stock that are still publicly listed. The hero-tier inventory-hygiene metric: any positive number is direct revenue blocker, fix-or-hide.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your BigCommerce data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A US homewares brand on BigCommerce Enterprise. Snapshot at 09:00 UTC on 13 Apr 26. Total catalogue: 1,840 products.
What’s interesting:
- 1.4% of catalogue is unbuyable but visible. Healthy stores sit 0-2%; above 5% suggests either a sync problem or a merchandiser not actively managing OOS hygiene. The 25-item count is workable, an hour of merchandiser time can resolve.
- 3 negative-stock items are the urgent priority. These are over-sold, customers placed orders that won’t ship. Each negative-stock entry needs immediate action: either reach out to refund the customer, or expedite restock. Negative stock is a customer-experience emergency, not just a hygiene issue.
- The 22 zero-stock items split by velocity. High-velocity zero-stock items are top-priority restocks; low-velocity items can be hidden until restock. Use BC Stock vs Sales for the velocity ranking.
- The 17 disabled items don’t count toward the alert. Correct hygiene. Merchants who use
availability = disabledproperly are punished by neither this card nor the per-channel OOS card.
- Investigate the 3 negative-stock items immediately. Customer-service contact list, refund-or-expedite decisions per customer.
- Hide low-velocity zero-stock items (
availability = disabled). - Restock high-velocity zero-stock items (use BC Top SKUs to find which).
- Audit inventory sync if the count is persistently above 5%, the sync gap is a structural issue, not just a merchandising oversight.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in BigCommerce Control Panel: Products → View, filter by Inventory level = 0, exclude Visibility = Disabled. The result count should match this card to within 1-2 items. Other BC views:- Settings → Inventory: configures inventory tracking; doesn’t surface counts.
- Catalogue → Categories: groups products into categories.
- Reports → Inventory snapshot (Plus / Pro): partial overlap, daily cadence.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why does the alert fire on >0? Because OOS-but-listed is always actionable. The right state for a stocked-out item is hidden, preorder, or restocked, never visible-but-unbuyable. Even one OOS-and-visible item is worth 30 seconds of merchandiser attention. What’s negative stock and how does it happen? BC supports over-selling tolerance: a product can ship beyond its on-hand count if the merchant configured the buffer. Negative stock means BC sold N more units than it had; if your warehouse can fulfil, no problem; if it can’t, you have customers waiting on un-shippable orders. Negative stock + cannot-fulfil is a customer-service emergency. Why is my count climbing every week? Three usual causes: (1) Supplier outage, multiple SKUs going OOS simultaneously suggests one supplier stopped delivering. (2) Inventory sync drift, the warehouse-to-BC integration is dropping updates; check sync logs. (3) Merchandiser disengagement, no one’s actively hiding OOS items. Each has a different fix. Should I auto-hide OOS items? For most stores, yes. Most BC themes support anif inventoryLevel > 0 condition; setting it once means OOS items disappear automatically from category and search pages. Direct PDP URLs may still load, but the customer journey is significantly cleaner. Do this once and it’s done.
Should I keep highly-popular OOS items visible to capture restock-notify signups?
Yes for items with strong restock-notify intent. The Klaviyo back-in-stock flow converts at 12-25% when the item returns; capturing emails on a popular OOS PDP is genuinely valuable. Use preorder mode where possible, and fall back to “notify me” for indefinite-restock items.
Why doesn’t BC show a single ‘OOS dashboard’ natively?
BC’s catalogue UI is built around individual SKUs, not store-wide hygiene reports. Plus / Pro plans have partial inventory reports, but the active “what’s broken right now” view doesn’t exist natively. This card fills that gap.
My count is 0, am I done?
For inventory hygiene specifically, yes. But pair with BC Channel OOS per Channel (per-channel breakdown often reveals issues this card doesn’t), BC Inventory Distribution (low-but-not-zero stock patterns), and BC Stock vs Sales (velocity-weighted view of which OOS items hurt most). Zero alert count is necessary but not sufficient for healthy inventory.
Multi-warehouse stores: does this card respect MLI (Multi-Location Inventory)?
Yes; we count items where TOTAL inventory across all locations is zero. Items where one location has zero but another has stock don’t appear here, that’s a fulfilment-routing question, not an OOS question.
Why does the card sometimes briefly spike then resolve?
Inventory sync timing. A stock-in event takes 5-30 minutes to propagate from warehouse to BC; during that window the items show as zero. The card’s RT refresh catches the transient state and resolves at the next sync.
Should this number ever be non-zero by design?
Almost never. Sustained non-zero counts are merchant-disengagement signal. The exceptions: (1) Brief windows during stock-in events. (2) Items deliberately listed for restock-notify capture. (3) Pre-order items with inventoryLevel = 0 but availability = preorder (we exclude these correctly). Outside these, zero is the right operating state.