Did you know that Google shows “out of stock” for items you label with the value of back ordered in your structured data for products? Some feel it should say back ordered and not out of stock, but I am not too sure if there is much of a difference?

Brian Freiesleben posted about this on Twitter and he also referenced others complaining about this in the Google Webmaster Help forums.

Here is what Google sees from the structured data, the item availability is marked as back ordered:

But instead of showing back ordered, Google displays out of stock in Google Search:

A year ago, Google began to officially support back ordered availability structured data. But again, Google does not show the item as back ordered, it shows it as out of stock.

Here are some of the complaints in the forums:

It was my understanding that the schema.org BackOrder availability status was added to the recognized values some time last year. However, products we have submitted with the BackOrder status are showing as In Stock in search results even though the Rich Results Test and Search Console both indicate that they’re detecting BackOrder.

It was indeed added to the recognized values, but it does behave like you say, the rich snippet display will show “In Stock” for this, I guess the distinction they’ve chosen is that if something is available to order, even with a short delay caused by something being on BackOrder, that’s in stock.

Interesting – I suppose I can understand the logic behind that approach, but it’s not exactly intuitive based on how the other availability statuses are treated.

Thank you, I appreciate the insight!

Product pages that use “BackOrder” availability in product SD still show “OutOfStock” in G search. I found a forum with others noting this too. Can you provide any insight on this @dannysullivan @JohnMu?

Screenshot example attached and forum linked – https://t.co/t65ezx1vi7 pic.twitter.com/yKdLNuhsvO

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— Brian Freiesleben (@type_SEO) May 18, 2022

John Mueller of Google asked if there is a difference…

We see these as two separate availabilities. We wanted to be as specific as possible for users and search engines.

Items are available on back order according to the https://t.co/PJ3RvzxTW5 def. of BackOrder – the current label in G search could be ‘Available on Back Order’. pic.twitter.com/XYBTXJ3gUB

— Brian Freiesleben (@type_SEO) May 18, 2022

So – what do you think? Is there a difference to the customer if an item is back ordered or currently out of stock?

Forum discussion at Twitter and Google Webmaster Help.