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Creator Desk
In-stock share is how long your link lives
The same measurement across eleven niches, read as link durability rather than as a stock statistic.
In-stock share is not a stock statistic. It is the best available estimate of how long a link you publish today will keep working. Across 11 creator niches measured the same way on 4 September 2026, it ranged from 100% in plus-size fashion to 60% in DIY and tools — a 1.7x spread between the safest and least safe niche to build a back catalogue in.
Nothing else about a niche moves the value of an evergreen post this much, and it is almost never mentioned in advice about choosing one.
In-stock share by niche
Every listing can carry an availability value set by the retailer. We read it on every US-targeted row in each niche pull.
| Niche | US listings | Stated in stock | In-stock share | Median asking price | US advertisers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plus-size fashion | 1,585 | 1,583 | 100% | $18.00 | 4 |
| weddings | 1,970 | 1,966 | 100% | $80.00 | 18 |
| menswear | 2,045 | 2,035 | 100% | $25.00 | 7 |
| book accessories | 575 | 565 | 98% | $121.99 | 26 |
| books | 708 | 683 | 96% | $17.82 | 19 |
| stationery and art | 551 | 520 | 94% | $30.99 | 27 |
| plants and garden | 747 | 695 | 93% | $43.99 | 45 |
| pets | 266 | 246 | 92% | $54.00 | 12 |
| car accessories | 561 | 460 | 82% | $16.28 | 20 |
| coffee and kitchen | 921 | 653 | 71% | $63.99 | 38 |
| DIY and tools | 926 | 553 | 60% | $41.00 | 35 |
Last verified 4 September 2026 against eleven niche pulls against live CJ feeds, 10,855 US listings read
Why this is a durability measure
A link is worth something only while it resolves to a product somebody can buy. The in-stock share of a category is the closest thing we can measure to the probability that any given link in it is still working — and it is measurable today, unlike the thing everyone actually wants, which is a decay curve over months.
Read the table as a ranking of how much maintenance a niche will demand. At 100%, a plus-size fashion round-up can sit for months and mostly still work. At 60%, a DIY and tools round-up is already a third wrong on the day you publish it.
What it changes about content planning
- Put evergreen formats on durable categories. “Best X of the year” belongs where the stock stays.
- Put perishable categories in perishable formats. A deal post is allowed to expire. A pillar page is not.
- Budget re-checking time by niche, not evenly. The difference between the top and bottom of this table is the difference between an annual review and a monthly one.
- Prefer the deep-bench niches for anything you intend to maintain, because when a link does die you need somewhere else to point it.
Keep reading
The thing this number cannot tell you
Availability here is the value the advertiser last wrote into its own feed. It cannot distinguish a temporary stockout from a discontinued line, and it cannot tell you how stale the value is. A listing marked in stock can still fail at the checkout.
The direction of that error is worth stating plainly: it means real availability is probably worse than every figure in the table above, not better. We are publishing an optimistic bound and calling it one.
It is also a single day’s reading. A genuine decay measurement needs the same links re-checked over weeks, which is a different study and one we have not run.
Frequently asked
What does in-stock share tell a creator?
Roughly how fast links in that category will rot. Across 11 niches on 4 September 2026 it ranged from 100% to 60%.
Which niches have the most durable affiliate links?
In our measurement, plus-size fashion at 100% in stock, followed by weddings at 100%.
Which have the least durable links?
DIY and tools at 60%, where specific models are stocked in limited numbers and discontinued regularly.
Is feed availability reliable?
It is the advertiser’s own last-written value, so it is a ceiling rather than a measurement: it cannot separate a temporary stockout from a discontinued product, and real availability is likely lower than it states.
Method, scope and limits
Query. CJ shoppingProducts, our companyId, keywords filter only, three seed terms per niche, twelve pages of 100 rows each, pulled 4 September 2026. Rows deduplicated on (advertiser, title, link), CJ demo advertisers excluded, US view taken as a post-filter on each row’s own targetCountry field. In-stock share is rows whose availability value begins “in stock”, over US rows.
What this cannot show. Not a decay curve, not retailers outside this network, and not the freshness of the availability value itself. Each niche is three seed terms, so the figure describes the slice of the category those words returned.
Keep measuring
How this page was made. Drafted with AI (Claude); not yet independently re-checked. How we work