You're a "Cock", if its "Out of Stock"!

Online shopping should be our saviour from ignorant and greedy crowds, exhorbitant fuel costs, crappy parking and nightmare traffic but I increasingly find it frustrating that many online retailers when they run out of a certain item to sell slap "Out of Stock" in the product description.

To a degree I also blame the search engines, they are after all supposed after all to bring us relevant results. Yet time and again whilst searching for Xmas presents I use search engines to help me find what I am looking for, see the snippet in their SERPS, hit the link and reach the online retailers website page.

I then check out the description, image and price only to find at the bottom of the page the online retailer has entered into that product's details "Out of Stock".

If that's the case then why not suspend the product in your database, delete the page so that you can allow another retailer (who actually bothered to invest in enough stock) to achieve a high listing and make a sale?

I've looked around and it seems the general feeling on the way out of this with a search engine is to list other relevant, related items you feel the user might want to see if the product is out of stock.

I disagree. I don't want to see other products, in "Andy's" immortal words "I want that one"....

Yes, yes it means that the search engine will remove your page or reduce its ranking but why should I bother with your website when your items for sale are listed as "out of stock"?

I emailed one website owner who said that he didn't plan for such demand (even in this credit crunch) and that being a small operation (likely from his garage) he didn't have the space to store everything he wanted. What, you not heard of drop shipping?

Yes its more expensive but at least the customer gets their product with the minimum of fuss. Downside of doing business with a mom and pop operation I suppose. And I always try to go out of my way to support the small retailer so it gets tiring when you consistently reach a website to find the product you want at the price shown is not available. I feel somewhat cheated.

I suggest the search engines deal with this in the following way:

If a spider crawls and spots "Out of Stock" then in some way this is used at the start of the snippet shown in the SERPS or in the Title tag if possible.

That way it might attract less clicks and perhaps reduce in ranking. Once the S/E bot returns and finds the product no longer labelled out of stock then perhaps its ranking can be increased.

Only downside of this is where a retailer then decides not to label products out of stock for fear of losing ranking....

But something's got to give... so if you're running an ecommerce website please don't have half your products as "Out of Stock", it looks unprofessional and wastes so many peoples time, including mine!