Products missing from the feed
What Product XML Import does when a product disappears from the supplier feed, why nothing is deleted, and how the 70 percent safety rule protects your catalogue.
Reviewed by Koray Sarı
Docs
Default behaviour
When a scheduled run finishes, every product that was created by the feed but is no longer in it is marked missing. Its variants are set to quantity zero at your location. The product itself, its images, description and URL stay as they are. If you have "continue selling when out of stock" off, the product shows as sold out.
The 70 percent rule
Supplier feeds sometimes come through truncated: a server timeout, a half-written file, a category left out. If the app blindly zeroed everything that was not in the truncated file, a large part of your catalogue would show as sold out for hours.
So before applying missing-product handling the app compares the product count with the previous successful run. If it is below 70 percent, the run is stopped, nothing is changed and the run is marked failed with the reason. An empty feed is stopped the same way.
Partial feeds by design
Some suppliers publish several feeds, one per category, or a feed that only lists changed products. For these, missing-product handling is disabled per feed by support so products in other feeds are not zeroed.
Checking what was marked missing
The run history shows the number of missing products per run. Support can list the SKUs on request.
Frequently asked questions
Why not delete products that are gone from the feed?
Deleted products lose their URL, reviews, collection membership and sales history. Setting stock to zero keeps all of that and lets the product return without any manual work.
Can I turn off the zero-stock behaviour?
Yes. Support can disable missing-product handling for a feed, for example when a supplier publishes partial feeds by category.
What happens when the product comes back?
The next run finds it in the feed again and restores price and quantity from the feed.