How to Hide Out of Stock Products on Shopify (4 Methods)

Q: Does hiding out-of-stock products hurt SEO?

It depends on how you hide them. Setting products to "Draft" returns a 404, which loses SEO equity. Removing them from collections via conditions also weakens your internal linking. The safest approach is to push them to the bottom of collections — keeping URLs live and internal links intact.

If you run a Shopify store, you’ve watched this happen. A customer lands on a collection page, spots something they like, clicks through, and it’s sold out. That’s a lost sale, and it leaves a bad impression.

So how do you hide out-of-stock products on Shopify? There are four common ways to do it, and they’re not equal. Here’s how each one works, and where each one falls short.

Why Out-of-Stock Products at the Top of Collections Hurt Your Store

It’s easy to underestimate how much a few sold-out items at the top of a page actually cost you. Here’s where it hurts.

Shoppers vote with their feet. When people hit an out-of-stock product, around 30% leave to look for it elsewhere (Baymard Institute). If the first thing they see is unavailable, a lot of them won’t scroll. They’ll go look at a competitor.

It costs conversions too, in a way you can actually measure. IHL Group research puts the global cost of out-of-stock situations at roughly $1 trillion in lost sales a year. Every click on a sold-out product is a click that could have gone to something buyable.

There’s a trust problem as well. A collection page covered in “Sold Out” badges looks neglected, and that’s especially rough on first-time visitors who don’t know you yet.

And then there’s SEO. Collection pages are often your highest-traffic entry points, so when they’re full of unavailable items, bounce rates climb and engagement drops. Google treats both as indirect ranking signals. We get into the details in how out-of-stock products hurt your SEO.

The good news is you’ve got options, from a five-minute manual fix to an app that handles it for you. Here are all four.

Method 1: Manually Hide Products in Shopify Admin

The simplest fix is to flip out-of-stock products to “Draft” status in your Shopify admin.

How to do it:

Go to Products in your Shopify admin
Find the out-of-stock product
Change its status from Active to Draft

Pros:

No apps or code required
Complete control over which products are hidden

Cons:

Extremely time-consuming if you have hundreds of products
You need to remember to re-publish products when they’re back in stock
You lose the product’s SEO value while it’s in draft (the URL returns a 404)
Doesn’t scale — impractical for stores with frequent inventory changes

This method works if you have a small catalog with rare stock changes. For everyone else, it’s unsustainable.

Method 2: Use Shopify’s Built-In Collection Sorting

Shopify offers several automatic collection sorting options, including “Best Selling” and “Price: Low to High.” Unfortunately, none of Shopify’s default sort options account for inventory status.

You can create an automated collection with the condition “Inventory stock is greater than 0,” but this completely removes out-of-stock products from the collection — which hurts your SEO.

The problem with removing products entirely:

The product URLs within that collection context disappear
Internal linking structure breaks
Customers can’t see that you carry the product (just that it’s temporarily unavailable)
You lose the opportunity to capture “notify me” sign-ups

What you actually want is to push out-of-stock items to the bottom of the page, not pull them from the collection. For a full breakdown of Shopify’s sorting options, see our complete collection sorting guide.

Method 3: Use Liquid Code to Sort by Inventory

If you’re comfortable editing theme code, you can use Shopify’s Liquid template language to sort products by availability on the collection page.

Here’s a basic example that splits products into in-stock and out-of-stock groups:

{% assign in_stock = collection.products | where: "available", true %}
{% assign out_of_stock = collection.products | where: "available", false %}

{% for product in in_stock %}
  {% render 'product-card', product: product %}
{% endfor %}

{% for product in out_of_stock %}
  {% render 'product-card', product: product %}
{% endfor %}

Pros:

Free — no app needed
Gives you full control over the sorting logic

Cons:

Requires developer knowledge of Liquid
Only changes what shows on the storefront. The actual collection order in Shopify’s API and admin stays the same
Can slow down page loads, since the sorting runs every time the page renders
Breaks when you update or switch your theme
Pagination gets messy. Shopify paginates from the original sort order, so out-of-stock products can still show up on the first pages
Doesn’t play well with Shopify’s AJAX-powered collection filtering

For most stores, the Liquid route causes more headaches than it fixes. It’s a patch, and it usually breaks the next time you touch your theme.

Method 4: Automate with Pushy (Recommended)

Pushy is a Shopify app built specifically for this problem. It automatically pushes out-of-stock products to the bottom of your collection pages and restores them to their original position when they’re back in stock.

Step-by-Step Setup

Getting started takes less than 2 minutes:

Install Pushy from the Shopify App Store. The app requests only the permissions it needs — product and collection access.
Open the app in your Shopify admin. You’ll see a list of all your collections.
Select which collections to manage. You can choose specific collections or enable it for all of them.
Toggle auto-push on. Pushy will immediately scan the selected collections and push any out-of-stock products to the bottom.
That’s it. From now on, Pushy monitors your inventory 24/7 and re-sorts your collections automatically whenever stock levels change.

Why This Approach Is Better

SEO-safe. Nothing gets unpublished. Products just move down the page, so your URLs and rankings stay intact.
Works at the API level. Unlike the Liquid workaround, Pushy changes the real sort order in Shopify, so the order is the same everywhere: your storefront, the admin, and any app that reads collection data.
Hands-off. Once it’s on, you don’t have to think about it. Products climb back up on their own when you restock.
No theme changes. Pushy works at the collection level, so there’s no Liquid to edit. It runs on any Shopify theme.
Fast. Changes land within minutes of an inventory update.
Restocking handled. When something comes back in stock, Pushy returns it to its original spot in the collection (or the top, if you prefer), so your curation isn’t lost.

Which Method Should You Choose?

Method	Best For	SEO Impact	Effort	Reliability
Manual Draft	Tiny catalogs (under 20 products)	Negative (404s)	High	Low
Collection Conditions	Simple stores	Negative (removes products)	Medium	Medium
Liquid Code	Developers with custom themes	Neutral (display only)	High	Low
Pushy App	All store sizes	None (preserves URLs)	Minimal	High

For most Shopify merchants, letting Pushy handle it is the easy call. It takes the manual work off your plate, keeps your SEO intact, and puts buyable products in front of shoppers first. If you want to compare, our rundown of Shopify out-of-stock apps shows how Pushy stacks up against the alternatives.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does hiding out-of-stock products hurt SEO?

It depends on how you hide them. Setting products to "Draft" returns a 404, which loses SEO equity. Removing them from collections via conditions also weakens your internal linking. The safest approach is to push them to the bottom of collections — keeping URLs live and internal links intact.

Can I hide out-of-stock products from search results on my store?

Shopify's built-in search doesn't filter by inventory status by default. You'd need a third-party search app or custom Liquid code to exclude out-of-stock items from search results. Pushy focuses on collection page sorting, which is where most customers browse.

How quickly does Pushy re-sort after inventory changes?

Pushy monitors inventory in near real-time. When a product goes out of stock or comes back in stock, the collection is re-sorted within minutes.

Will Pushy work with my theme?

Yes. Pushy works at the Shopify API level, not the theme level. It's compatible with every Shopify theme — no code changes required.

What happens when an out-of-stock product is restocked?

Pushy moves it back to its original position in the collection (or to the top, depending on your settings). Your carefully curated product order is preserved.

Get Started

Ready to stop losing sales to out-of-stock products? Install Pushy for free and automate your collection sorting today.