What happens when a discontinued product sells out

When the last unit of a discontinued product is gone, SKU.io can tidy up after it: end its listings on your sales channels and, if you choose, archive the product. This page explains when a product counts as sold out, what SKU.io does then, and what happens when something doesn't go to plan.

You choose the action on the Sell-out tab of Settings → Products → Product Lifecycle. See Choose what happens when a product sells out.

Which products this applies to

Only products in a state whose When it sells out row says Use the sell-out setting are checked. Out of the box that's Discontinued. Active and Phasing out products are never ended or archived, because you might still restock them.

A matrix product isn't checked as a whole. Each variant is checked on its own.

When a product counts as sold out

A product is sold out only when nothing is left anywhere:

• No stock on hand in any warehouse, including Amazon FBA, AWD, Walmart Fulfillment Services and your 3PLs. Units on a stock hold still count as on hand.
• Nothing in transit or inbound, such as a warehouse transfer on its way.
• Nothing allocated to an order.
• Nothing still to arrive on an open purchase order.
• No units in the latest Amazon FBA inventory report.

So an open purchase order line or an allocated backorder keeps the product from selling out, even when the shelf is empty.

A bundle counts as sold out when its components can no longer make a single complete bundle.

Sold out isn't the same as out of stock

On the Sell-through tab of PIM → Lifecycle, a product with nothing on hand but something still in transit, inbound, allocated or on order shows Out of stock, not Sold out. Hover the status to see what it's still waiting on. Only Sold out products get the sell-out action. See Work the Lifecycle workspace.

How quickly SKU.io notices

SKU.io checks a product:

• About 10 minutes after its stock changes. Waiting a few minutes means a burst of orders is checked once, not once per order.
• Straight away when you discontinue a product that already has no stock.
• In a nightly sweep, which catches anything the other two missed.

Once a product is sold out, SKU.io waits for the Grace period you set on the Sell-out tab before it acts, so customer returns already on their way can arrive. If stock comes back during the wait, the action is cancelled, and the product's lifecycle history says why: "Sell-out cancelled: stock came back".

What SKU.io does to the listings

After the grace period, each listing gets its channel's action: your default, or that channel's override on the Sell-out tab.

Action	What happens
Keep its listings live at zero	No channel is changed. The listing stays live and shows as out of stock.
End its listings	Each listing is ended in the way its channel supports. On some channels that means setting the quantity to 0.
End its listings and archive the product	Each listing is ended, then the product is archived in SKU.io.

What "End" means differs from channel to channel. The Sell-out behaviour by channel reference lists each one.

Channels that end a listing by setting it to zero

On a channel where ending means quantity 0, the listing counts as ended only once the channel confirms the zero. Until then the outcome in the product's history is pending, and the product isn't archived.

Variants that share one channel product

On channels such as Shopify, several of your variants can share one product on the channel. SKU.io ends that shared product only when every variant on it is linked to a SKU.io product, discontinued and sold out. Until then, only the sold-out variant goes to zero, and your store's theme usually shows it greyed out while its siblings keep selling. SKU.io never deletes a single variant.

If the shared channel product has a variant that isn't linked to anything in SKU.io, the shared product isn't ended.

When the product is archived

SKU.io archives the product only when both are true:

• Your default action is End its listings and archive the product, or at least one channel's override is End + archive (archives the product once every channel has ended it).
• Every listing has reached its end state.

The product isn't archived when:

• Any channel keeps its listing live at zero.
• Any channel refused to end its listing.
• Stock or the product's state changed while the action was running. The run stops, and the history says "Sell-out stopped: stock or the state changed".

An archived product keeps its lifecycle state, so it's still Discontinued. It just leaves the default views of lists and reports.

Archive a sold-out product yourself

If you keep listings live, you can still archive sold-out products by hand. Tick them on the Sell-through tab and click Archive. Only rows with zero stock can be archived. The Needs action this week list on the Overview tab counts sold-out products waiting to be archived.

When stock comes back

If stock arrives for a product the sell-out archived, such as a customer return, a late purchase order or an inventory adjustment, SKU.io:

• Brings the product back out of the archive, as Discontinued, never Active.
• Sends the Lifecycle: Stock Returned to a Sold-out Product alert.
• Leaves its ended listings ended, unless Relist when discontinued stock comes back is on. With it on, SKU.io recovers the listings it ended.

Only stock on hand brings a product back. Stock that's only on order or in transit doesn't.

When a channel refuses

If a channel refuses to end a listing, for example because its connection has expired, SKU.io tries again about 1, 5 and 15 minutes later. If it still fails, SKU.io:

• Sends the Lifecycle: Sell-out Action Failed alert.
• Leaves the product unarchived.
• Records "Sell-out failed on at least one channel" in the product's history.

Fix the problem with the channel, then run the action again: on the Sell-through tab, open the row's menu and click Retry sell-out action. It's available only when the product's last sell-out run failed or was stopped. Otherwise it's greyed out, and its tooltip says why. The next nightly sweep also tries failed runs again.

Where you see what happened

Each sell-out run adds a row to the Lifecycle card on the product's page, with the source Sold out. A product that's restored adds a row with the source Stock came back. The What happened column sums it up, for example "Sold out: listings ended, product archived" or "Sold out: listings kept live at zero". Expand the row to see each channel's outcome, and the reason when the product wasn't archived.

When a run completes, SKU.io also sends the Lifecycle: Discontinued Product Sold Out alert and starts any automation that uses the matching trigger. Runs that failed or were stopped don't. See Lifecycle alerts, automations and permissions.

Undo after a sell-out

You can usually undo a lifecycle change for 24 hours. Once the sell-out action has ended at least one listing, undo is refused with "The sell-out action has already ended at least one of its listings, so this change cannot be undone. Reactivate it instead." See Reactivate a product or undo a change.

Send shoppers to the successor on Shopify

When a Shopify product page goes away, shoppers who follow an old link land on an error page. On the Sell-through tab, you can redirect those pages straight away instead of waiting:

1. Tick archived or sold-out rows, up to 200 at a time.
2. Click Create Shopify redirect now.

Each page redirects to the product's successor, or to the store's fallback collection when there's no successor. The Shopify redirects window lists each product as Redirected, Skipped or Failed, with the reason, such as "No Shopify listing." Set up the fallback collection on the Channels tab. See Set up channel lifecycle behaviour.

What sell-out doesn't do

• It doesn't remove stock from Amazon's warehouses. For discontinued stock at FBA, use the FBA checklist.
• It doesn't change a product's lifecycle state. A sold-out product stays Discontinued.
• It doesn't touch products you archived by hand.

Next steps

• Choose what happens when a product sells out: set the action, the per-channel overrides and the grace period.
• Work the Lifecycle workspace: find sold-out products and retry failed runs.
• Sell-out behaviour by channel: what End and Delete do on each marketplace.