Guide · Shelf intelligence
Not listed or out of stock? Two different problems
A product missing from a dark store is either not listed there or listed and out. Each has a different owner and a different fix.
A shopper in one neighbourhood cannot find your product on an app. That single fact hides two different problems, and they are solved by different people. Mixing them up is a common mistake in reading a brand’s availability on quick commerce.
Three states, not two
For one product in one dark store, there are three things that can be true:
- In stock. The store lists the product and has it.
- Listed, out of stock. The store carries the product and has run out. On most apps the product is still on the page, marked as unavailable.
- Not listed. The store does not carry the product. It is not on that store’s shelf at all.
“Available in 60% of stores” squashes the last two together. A brand that is listed in 60% of stores and always in stock there has a listing problem. A brand listed everywhere and in stock in 60% has a supply problem. The same headline number, two opposite jobs.
Who owns each one
- Not listed is a decision about a store’s range. It is usually raised with the app’s category team, with the list of stores.
- Out of stock is about getting goods to a store that already carries them. It is usually a supply matter: orders, fill rates, the warehouse that feeds that store.
Take an out-of-stock list to a listing conversation, or the other way round, and the meeting goes nowhere.
Why it is hard to tell them apart
To say a product is not listed in a store, you have to know you saw that store’s whole shelf for the category. If you read half a list and did not see the product, you have learnt nothing: it may be further down.
That is the rule Shelf holds to across the 11,234 stores it reads in 984 cities: a store is named as not listing a product only where its whole category list was seen, which Blinkit and BigBasket show.Zepto, Swiggy Instamart and Flipkart Minutesshow part of a list at a time, so there Shelf shows where a product is listed, and never calls a store a gap.
One more trap: some apps do not show a product at all while it is out of stock. On those, a missing product cannot be told from an unlisted one in a single read, and the accurate label is “not on the shelf at this read”.
What to count
For each product, on each app, in each city, three numbers in a row:
- Stores whose whole category shelf was seen.
- Of those, stores that list the product.
- Of those, stores where it was in stock at the read.
The drop from the first to the second is your listing gap. The drop from the second to the third is your stock gap. Each comes with a list of stores, and each list goes to a different person.
Both are snapshots. A store that was out on the day of a read may have been refilled the next morning, so a stock figure always needs its date beside it.