Stock: availability, fulfilment and delivery promise
The Stock page (Stock & Availability) covers everything about whether a competitor can actually deliver: who is in stock, who controls the inventory, how fast each listing promises to arrive, who charges for delivery, and what changed since the last capture.
Availability is a competitive lever, not an operations detail
Two things decide whether a shopper can buy from your rival: whether the product is there, and whether it arrives soon enough. Both move week to week, and both are invisible in conventional market data.
A competitor going out of stock is a short window where their demand has to land somewhere else. A shelf where most listings are held by third-party sellers is structurally fragile — those listings can disappear when one seller runs out. And delivery promise has quietly become a merchandising variable: a shopper who filters for fast delivery never sees a listing that cannot offer it, no matter how good its price or rating.
This page treats all of that as competitive intelligence rather than logistics reporting.
Availability
A count of in-stock, out-of-stock and unknown listings. The distinction between out-of-stock and not checked is enforced throughout: a listing Rove could not read this period is shown as unknown and is never counted as absent. Treating an unread listing as a stockout would manufacture opportunities that do not exist.
Who controls the shelf
The split between listings sold by the retailer (1P — supply is generally stable) and third-party sellers (3PL — can disappear if that seller runs out), plus the percentage that is retailer-fulfilled. A heavily third-party shelf is a fragility signal, though only when combined with actual stockouts.
Gaps to exploit
Competitors currently out of stock — the clearest short-term opening on the page. If nobody is out of stock, the page says so plainly rather than padding the section.
What changed this period, and Availability over time
Stock-state changes versus the previous capture, and a chart of in-stock versus out-of-stock counts across all tracked periods so you can see whether the shelf is generally tight or generally comfortable.
Delivery promise
Two medians sit at the top:
- Standard delivery — the median of the default promise shown, i.e. the speed floor before paying for anything quicker.
- Fastest available — the median of the quickest option shown, paid or via a membership programme, across the listings where one could be read.
Beneath that, a distribution of standard promises in bands (next day or sooner, 2 days, 3–4 days, and so on), with unmeasured listings shown greyed and hatched — never counted as slow.
The page is explicit about what this figure is: the retailer's promise at the moment of capture, from Rove's request location, for the seller holding the buy box. It is not a guarantee and it is not a record of what actually arrived.
Standard promise vs the fastest they offer
The widest gaps between a listing's default promise and its quickest paid option. That gap is what a shopper pays for, or gets free with a membership — a large gap means the headline promise understates how fast that competitor can really be.
Who ships it — 1P, FBA and FBM
The fulfilment split hiding inside the third-party count: retailer-owned stock, seller stock in the retailer's warehouse (which inherits retailer speed), and seller-shipped listings (which depend entirely on that seller's own dispatch). This is usually the single most explanatory field on the page.
Who offers a faster option
How many listings offer any expedited option at all, broken down by fulfilment type. On many shelves this splits sharply — retailer-fulfilled listings almost all offer one, seller-shipped listings almost never do — which makes expedited availability a real differentiator rather than a technicality.
What it really costs — delivery added
Listings that charge for delivery, showing shelf price, true delivered cost and the percentage uplift. For low-priced items a delivery surcharge can more than double what the shopper actually pays, which means the Pricing page's shelf price is not the whole story for those listings.
Promise by shelf position and Delivery sensitivity
The median promise for each block of five shelf positions, and a longer-running analysis of whether a slower promise travels with a worse position on this specific shelf.
The sensitivity read is deliberately conservative. It requires a minimum of comparable history and measured promise-change outcomes before it will state a verdict, and until then it says so and shows the evidence accumulating. Individual promise changes are logged with the rank outcome a week later, marked "outcome pending" where the week has not yet passed. This is an association within one tracked shelf — never a cause, and never a read on demand or sales.
Speed against price
A scatter of every readable listing: promise speed against shelf price, split into fast/slow and keen/premium quadrants with median lines. Listings with no readable promise or price are omitted rather than plotted at zero, because a missing value is not a fast one.
Delivery changes this period, and Promise over time
Who sped up, who slowed down, who added a faster option, who started charging, and who changed fulfilment route — followed by a chart of the median promise across periods. Only captures taken on the same weekday are plotted, because delivery promises are strongly weekday-shaped and joining two different weekdays would show the calendar moving rather than your competitors.
