Public product-feed benchmark · 2026-08-28

The Dead SKU Report

We read the public product feed of 34 well-known Shopify stores. 2,079 of their 10,107 published products were completely out of stock — still live, still crawlable, still being fed to Google Shopping.

34 stores10,107 products55,320 variantsRead from /products.json
2,079Published products with every variant out of stock
32/34Stores carrying at least one
11/34Stores where over 20% of the catalogue is dead
10.2%Median share of dead products per store

What we found

The finding

A product whose every variant is unavailable does not quietly disappear. Its page stays live and indexed, it keeps absorbing crawl budget, it keeps receiving ad clicks, and it keeps being submitted to Google Shopping and Meta catalogues — where it is suppressed or disapproved rather than sold. Shoppers who land on it bounce.

This is not a rare failure. 32 of the 34 stores we scanned were carrying dead products, and 11 of them were carrying enough to affect a meaningful share of their catalogue. The worst in the sample, intelligentsia.com, had 234 of 331 published products (70.7%) with nothing buyable on the page. The median store scored 80 out of 100.

These are competent, well-run brands. That is the point: the problem accumulates silently because nothing in Shopify surfaces it, and the public feed is the one place it becomes measurable from outside.

Every store we scanned

Ranked worst score first · lower is worse
StoreScoreProductsVariantsDeadShare of catalogue dead
intelligentsia.com 48 331 500 234
70.7%
counterculturecoffee.com 51 173 284 118
68.2%
athleticbrewing.com 54 260 419 161
61.9%
allbirds.com 54 293 2,855 211
72%
onyxcoffeelab.com 60 248 623 95
38.3%
peets.com 62 310 1,150 79
25.5%
greatjonesgoods.com 72 68 354 13
19.1%
hedleyandbennett.com 72 928 1,515 413
44.5%
parachutehome.com 73 1,578 4,450 338
21.4%
kosas.com 74 86 330 6
7%
chubbiesshorts.com 75 1,605 9,670 45
2.8%
ridgewallet.com 77 146 198 44
30.1%
brooklinen.com 77 468 6,159 18
3.8%
floydhome.com 77 172 2,887 7
4.1%
materialkitchen.com 77 58 171 9
15.5%
stumptowncoffee.com 79 101 138 31
30.7%
drsquatch.com 80 548 613 56
10.2%
wildone.com 80 57 329 16
28.1%
magicspoon.com 83 241 342 25
10.4%
tenthousand.cc 84 123 5,727 0
0%
starface.world 84 51 56 1
2%
rothys.com 85 710 12,385 109
15.4%
nativecos.com 86 97 523 4
4.1%
glossier.com 86 113 356 1
0.9%
maxbone.com 88 100 567 6
6%
lolavie.com 88 44 63 1
2.3%
liquid-iv.com 89 72 76 1
1.4%
functionofbeauty.com 89 39 199 0
0%
beardbrand.com 90 74 111 9
12.2%
hydrojug.com 92 466 757 6
1.3%
lacolombe.com 93 59 127 6
10.2%
klatchcoffee.com 95 91 620 5
5.5%
deathwishcoffee.com 97 148 425 3
2%
misen.com 98 249 341 8
3.2%
This table is not a criticism of these brands. Every figure is a single snapshot of a public feed, and a store can list an out-of-stock product deliberately — for a pre-order, a seasonal return or a discontinued line kept for SEO. It is published to show how ordinary the pattern is. Any brand listed here can have their row removed on request, and can have their full audit for free.

What the audit checks

Across the 34-store sample
CheckStores affectedItems found
Published products with every variant out of stock 32/34 2,079
Shippable variants with zero weight 29/34 14,514
Products with some but not all variants out of stock 28/34 1,977
Products with no product type 27/34 2,208
Variants with no SKU 26/34 4,539
Variants priced at zero 20/34 906
Variants where the compare-at price equals the selling price 14/34 5,070
Products with no image at all 13/34 179
Duplicate product titles 12/34 150
Variants where the compare-at price is lower than the selling price 7/34 74

Get this for your own store

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  • Your feed health score and dead-product count
  • The first 25 dead products, with links
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€19 one-off
  • Every dead product, not the first 25
  • All 10 checks, each as a CSV with product URLs
  • A fix list ordered by what costs you most

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  • Your store and up to five competitors
  • Price bands, assortment depth and discount rates side by side
  • Where your range is thin and where theirs is

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  • Weekly re-scan of your feed
  • A diff: what went dead, what came back, what changed price
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It runs entirely inside your own browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and no account is involved — which also means we never see your result, so if you want the full CSVs you have to ask for them. The free check is genuinely unlimited: it costs a couple of seconds of your own computer, so there is nothing to ration.

If the result is bad enough that you want every affected product rather than the first twelve, plus the order to fix them in, that is the €19 audit — and you will have seen your score before deciding. Or just send a store URL to seehuetterdominik@gmail.com.

How it works

Send a store URL. Everything is read from that store's own public /products.json feed — the same file Google Shopping, Meta catalogues and every marketplace importer already read. There is no login, no app install, no code on your site, and nothing touching order or customer data. robots.txt is checked and respected before the first request, and a store that disallows it is skipped rather than worked around.

A scan takes a few seconds. The audit comes back as a single self-contained HTML file you can open or forward, plus the CSVs.