glazergallery

Just to update, as of now I have tried some random searches and a full week after removing product schema with the code provided above by @mahfuzurwp it appears the “out of stock” notices on Google searches have finally disappeared. Thank you!

Hi Zubair,

I looked into that plugin, but determined that Google Merchant Center is not right for our business because we are selling one-of-a-kind art and antiques that each have their own shipping requirements, so we also omit shipping methods. Therefore we disable the “shopping cart” feature and use the Yith plug-in that converts WooCommerce to “catalog only.” And that worked great for nine years — people contact us when they want to buy online or make an appointment to visit the shop. On a Google Search help forum another store owner experiencing the same problem offered this idea and I wonder what you at WooCommerce think of this:

“I have been looking in the structured data which is supplied on the product pages of your website. 
At first sight everything looks correct with the Google Search Central documentation and schema testing tools. The product data results in a ‘product snippet’ and a ‘Merchant Listing’. Only for the merchant listings there is a separate documentation with requirements. https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324448

“In this document not only the mapping for the availability is explained (where InStoreOnly is mapped to out_of_stock), but also the Minimum requirements are defined for the products. And on the top of this section is stated when you don’t follow these requirements, we disapprove your product. One of requirements is the “Match your product availability with your account shipping”, that you should list a shipping method in the data. I think this is were yours availability is switched to “out of stock”.

“I also noticed that there are products which don’t have a price mentioned on the product page and therefore also have no product schema data on the page. When I look up these items in the search results I don’t see a “out of stock” mentioned.

“For us the solution is/was to remove the product schema data from the product pages. We see that the “out of stock” mention is (mostly) deleted from the search results. And the prices are still visible for the products. I hope this info helps you to get forward in solving this annoying problem.”

So my question to you all at WooCommerce is: Can you offer some code people like me who are experiencing this problem can copy and add to my Child Theme to remove the product schema data?

Why is this marked resolved? It definitely is not!

Zubair,

Does this article about the “availability attribute” potentially have anything to do with it, and is there I way to fix this within WooCommerce so Google reads my pages correctly? —

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324448?hl=en&sjid=16326235260713477235-NA

While in the Google Search Console I saw it was promoting me to add Google for WooCommerce and join the Google Merchant Center? Should I do that? Would installing Google Analytics for WooCommerce and following the steps possibly solve this problem? I downloaded the plugin but hesitate to set this up without really understanding it.

Thank you for pointing me in the direction of sitemap generating plugins. I followed up and chose one that generated XML files for the Product Pages, Categories, and Pages. I have successfully uploaded them to Google although it appears as of 24 hours later, the site has not yet been recrawled. However, in trying from random search terms that relate to our site, I have discovered that it is not just a problem for us but for some very large businesses. This is certainly a serious bug for businesses that rely on Google for people to find us. I could see this is a problem affecting large businesses like Incollect and 1stDibs, too, and they are written on different platforms. We use WordPress with a WooCommerce plugin, but a look at their page source code shows they are built differently, but we all have the same problem. Try searching for “hb nims floor globe” and you will see that it’s not just us — while the Search Results for Incollect and 1stDibs say “Out of Stock,” if you click the links, they are most definitely In Stock.

I am not totally persuaded that recrawling our site is going to fix the problem, though, because obviously Google is finding the pages and their content and images, and the Rich Results Test on one of the URLs Google is showing as Out of Stock in the search results it returns for https://www.georgeglazer.com/wpmain/product/game-astronomy-moon-and-stars-ring-toss-american-c-1925/ shows the following data: “availability   http://schema.org/InStock”  Why then, does it display it as Out of Stock?!

I posted this exact question on the Search Console Forum and urged Google to address this immediately. I also wrote to Incollect and 1stDibs and pointed it out to them, hoping that a large business with more resources than we have will be able to move Google to address what looks more and more like a Google bug. Keep this thread open and I will update you all if I find a resolution.

@shameemreza I finally found the problematic code and it was where you and others suspected, in the custom code in the child theme. As I said in the first post I made describing this issue, the debug log said that the problematic command was add_text. However, I had no idea what function was calling on add_text. I had looked for it in all the child theme PHP files by doing a Find command with my browser on each page, while it was loaded in the Dashboard. I tested the Find function by searching for code I knew was in the PHP file and it worked. But for some reason, it did NOT find add_text, even though it was there in my child theme’s functions.php file. I even tried that search on different days and it never turned up. It seems weird, but that’s what kept happening.

The way I finally found where add_text was hiding was through the Find function in Bluefish, which is an open source editor for webpage code that I use sometimes to edit HTML files on non-WordPress sites. I searched the files I had stored on my local machine and it found it in the child theme functions.php and Bluefish’s Find also told me which line it was on. Now that I knew where it was, I deleted that code and PHP 8 is not causing the problem on product pages — nor, apparently anywhere else. I know what the purpose of that code was, it was indeed specific to product pages, but I can accomplish the same thing another way so I don’t need it anymore.

Therefore, my advice to anyone else who is looking for a specific phrase in your Child Theme while it’s open in the File Editor in the WordPress dashboard is see if you can do a Find somewhere else, because Find in the dashboard may not work.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by glazergallery.

@ckadenge — Thanks for the tip. I did try testing for plug in conflicts before and turned up nothing useful, but I can try again. Today I created a staging site so I can do that methodically. I will report back to this thread what I find.

The standard advice for resolving theme conflicts probably doesn’t help because if I change the theme to Storefront or one of the basic themes, the masthead won’t display correctly anyway, because the masthead formatting is stored in the Child Theme.

As for “add_text” — that’s very interesting that you are able to see that is the command causing problems. I am able to see that it does not appear in any of the .php files for my Child Theme so we can rule it out there at least, if I understand you correctly.