Which products are most often out of stock in store, and why?

The out-of-stock league table

The survey by ECR France, the body that brings together manufacturers and retailers, over September 2013 to September 2014, gives an average out-of-stock rate of 5.7% of products in French supermarkets, an estimated €1.07 billion of lost sales over the year. Behind this average, the gaps between categories are huge:

Category	Out-of-stock rate
Hair colour	15.6%
Make-up	14.2%
Champagne	13.6%
Pens	12.3%
Facial care	12.0%
Light bulbs	11.9%
Infant milk	10.3%
Sparkling wine	10.0%
Frozen seafood	9.8%
Sorbets and ice cream	9.5%

At the other end, the best available categories are butter (2.4%), sliced bread (2.3%) and eggs (2.2%).

In the UK, the ECR UK industry measure, run with IGD on 350 large stores and 200 fast-selling lines, found on-shelf availability of about 92%, an out-of-stock rate of about 8% on the lines that matter most; a 2026 national audit by Retail Economics and DHL puts average on-shelf availability at 89.7%, and one grocery trip in five includes an out-of-stock item.

What the most affected categories have in common

It is not logistics that separates a hair colour from a pack of butter. It is the number of references. A hair colour comes in dozens of shades, make-up in dozens of tones, a pen in dozens of colours and tips. Three consequences:

1. A facing per reference that is too short. Shelf space is shared between many references, each has room for only a few units: two sales empty the facing.
2. Replenishment that is hard to prioritise. In front of sixty shades, the employee who fills cannot see which one is missing without a precise list; they put back what they have in hand.
3. Fragile book stock. The more similar references there are, the more frequent the entry, placement and counting errors: the system believes the product is present.

Infant milk is the opposite case but just as costly: little substitution possible (a parent does not change milk), so every out-of-stock is a lost sale and often a lost customer. Champagne and sparkling wine add seasonality: out-of-stocks concentrate on festive periods, when sales are highest.

What it changes for the store manager

Reading by category usefully replaces the store average: an overall rate of 6% can be satisfactory in grocery and disastrous in beauty. Three targeted actions on categories with many references:

• reduce the range to the references that really sell, to give room back to the others;
• count out-of-stocks per reference, not per category, with a list or continuous detection, otherwise replenishment does not know what to put back;
• watch the book stock of these categories with more frequent cycle counts.

On infant milk and products without substitutes, the priority is detection speed: every hour of out-of-stock is a net lost sale. Measurement methods are detailed in how to measure sales lost to out-of-stocks and the levers in how to reduce out-of-stocks on the shelf.

What shopper reporting changes

In front of sixty shades of hair colour, only the shopper knows which one is missing. With ShelfAlert, they scan it in two seconds; the manager receives the exact reference, and the dashboard ranks the most-requested products, category by category. 14-day trial, no payment card: see the plan for store managers.

Sources

• ECR France survey, September 2013 to September 2014, reported by Journal du Net.
• ECR UK / IGD on-shelf availability measure: On-shelf availability: the case of a UK grocery retailer, International Journal of Logistics Management; Retail Economics and DHL, The availability effect report 2026.
• Gruen, Corsten, Bharadwaj, “Retail Out-of-Stocks: A Worldwide Examination”, GMA, 2002: full study (PDF).