Questions · Evaluate

How should I mark preorder and backorder availability?

Both have schema.org values, and using the accurate one is better than leaving the field out. An agent can decide whether a shopper who wants an item next week should be shown a backordered one. It cannot decide anything from an absent field.

Why it happens

Availability is the field that decides whether a recommendation is safe. An agent that recommends a sold out item wastes the shopper trip it was asked to prevent, so agents weight unknown availability towards not recommending.

This bites hardest on stores where sold out variants stay listed, which is most stores. The catalogue looks large and healthy to a person browsing it, and reads to an agent as a set of products whose purchasability is unknown.

Run a free scan and find out which of these your store actually hits.