70% of the gadgets on one popular gift feed cannot be bought
We took 819 products from the archive of a large gift and gadget feed, ranked by how often readers saved them, and asked Amazon about every one. 243 could still be bought, or 30%. Checked September 10, 2026, 08:17 UTC.
Gift shortlists and gadget round-ups are written once and rarely checked again. The products in them sell out, get discontinued, or lose their listing entirely, and the links stay up regardless. Nobody publishes what that costs a reader, so we measure it.
Everything we track
The table below covers our whole catalogue, 4187 products from both sources. It runs healthier than the shortlist figure above, for a reason explained in the next section.
| Status | Items | Share | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| In stock and buyable today | 3609 | 86.2% | The listing exists, has a new-condition offer and a price. |
| Out of stock | 293 | 7.0% | The listing is still there. You cannot buy it. |
| No longer in the catalogue | 252 | 6.0% | The product code returns nothing at all. The link is dead. |
| Pre-order only | 18 | 0.4% | A future ship date rather than a price you can act on. |
| Used or damaged offers only | 15 | 0.4% | Nothing new is available from any seller. |
| Tracked in total | 4187 | 100% |
Where a listing comes from changes everything
We find products two ways, and the difference between them is the sharpest result here.
| Source | Tracked | Still buyable | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Published shortlists and round-ups | 819 | 243 | 30% |
| Searched by us today | 3368 | 3366 | 100% |
A listing written into an article stays there after the product goes. A listing found by searching the catalogue exists by definition, at least at the moment you find it. The gap between those two rows is what published gift advice costs a reader once it ages.
How this is measured
Candidates come from two places: gadget and gift shortlists that circulate publicly, and our own keyword searches of the Amazon catalogue. Every candidate from either source is then asked about, every day. A product counts as buyable only if the listing exists, carries a new-condition offer, has a price, and reports stock. Pre-orders do not count, because a future ship date is not something you can act on. Used and damaged offers do not count either.
Two limits on that number, both worth saying out loud. It is one archive rather than the whole internet: a spot check of another gift site's recent pages came back around four fifths buyable, because posts published this month have not had time to rot. And the sample is ranked by popularity, which spans years, so what it really measures is what happens to a gift list as it ages, not what any site looks like on the day it publishes. We name no publisher, because the pattern belongs to old content rather than to any one of them.
These counts are rebuilt from live data every day, so this page will not agree with a screenshot taken last week. That is the point of it. The full checking procedure covers what happens to a product once it fails.