Out-of-stock SKUs that are also generating support complaints, where lost availability is turning into lost goodwill.
At a glance
Complaints on Out-of-Stock SKUs is a cross-platform revenue-at-risk metric that joins your Intercom conversations to your commerce catalogue’s inventory. It lists the SKUs that are currently out of stock and attracting refund, stock, or availability complaints, the items where a stockout has crossed over from a missed sale into an actively annoyed customer. For a sports retailer like Blitz, that is the popular boot in the wrong size, or the team kit that sold through before a fixture. The card only renders when an ecommerce-platform or marketplace sibling connector is connected, because the inventory side of the join lives there.
Calculation
The card pulls SKUs from the connected commerce sibling where currenton_hand inventory is at or below zero, then joins them to Intercom conversations created in the trailing 30 days that carry a refund, stock, or availability tag and reference that SKU (via the conversation’s linked order, mentioned product, or matched contact). Each output row is one out-of-stock SKU with its associated complaint count and links to the underlying conversations. The only_when gate keeps the card hidden unless an ecommerce-platform or marketplace sibling is connected, since the inventory side of the join cannot otherwise be resolved.
Worked example
A representative reading of Complaints on Out-of-Stock SKUs for Blitz, the sports retailer. The table shows five rows. At the top:BOOT-PRED-UK9, Predator boots, UK size 9, out of stock, with 11 complaint conversations in 30 days, mostly “when is this back?” and “you let me add it to basket”. Below it, a club jersey at 6 complaints and three long-tail items at 1-2 each. The support lead reads this as two distinct jobs. The runaway SKU at the top is a buying problem: the founder forwards it to the merchandising team to expedite a reorder and turns on a back-in-stock notify. The long tail is a content problem: the product pages should not be letting shoppers add unavailable sizes to basket. Without the join, these 20-odd complaints would have been scattered, untriaged “where’s my size” tickets. To see the revenue gap behind the top SKU, cross-reference the commerce sibling’s out-of-stock or lost-sales card; for natural-language exploration, ask Ask Viq “which sold-out SKUs are getting the most complaints”.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Intercom’s own dashboard: Intercom can show you the complaint side but not the inventory side. In Reports → Conversations, filter by therefund, stock, and availability tags to see the volume of availability-related conversations, or build a saved Inbox view on those tags. Intercom has no concept of which SKU is out of stock, so it cannot rank by SKU or join to on-hand inventory, that linkage is what Vortex IQ adds by pulling the catalogue from the commerce sibling.
Why the Vortex IQ value may legitimately differ:
Cross-connector reconciliation: reconcile the inventory side against the commerce sibling’s out-of-stock / inventory card, if it reports a SKU in stock that this card shows as complained-about, the sync windows are out of step. For divergence investigations, use Vortex Mind.
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Q: How often does Complaints on Out-of-Stock SKUs update? The card refreshes on the standard data refresh (typically every 30-60 minutes for live integrations). Inventory and conversation data are both re-pulled on that cycle; force a manual refresh after a known restock. Q: Why is the card empty when I have stockouts? Either no out-of-stock SKU has attracted a tagged complaint in the last 30 days (a quiet, well-managed stockout), or the commerce sibling is not connected, the card is gated byonly_when and needs an ecommerce-platform or marketplace connector for the inventory join.
Q: A SKU is back in stock but still shows here. Why?
The complaint conversations are dated within the 30-day window, so they can persist after a restock until they age out. Check the inventory snapshot timestamp against the conversation dates.
Q: Can I customise the alert threshold?
Yes. The default alert fires whenever any out-of-stock SKU has complaints; the alert threshold is configurable per profile in the Alert Rules tab if you want to surface only SKUs above a complaint count.