Discontinued Products - What Do You Do?

We've been using CS Cart for our store for about 4 years now and I assume like most businesses, we add new products, stop selling ones that don't do well and manufacturers discontinue products. This has led us to where we have almost as many disabled (discontinued) products as active ones. What is everyone doing with these? Do you delete them? It is getting annoying when I search for a product and half of the list are disabled ones? Maybe modify the default for the product search to only include active and hidden? (Anyone have code for this?) If you do delete them, what impact does that have on the older orders?

You can delete them and the product title will still remain in old orders.. you just won't be able to edit the product anymore. I personally don't see the need to keep them in your database unless there is a chance you will source it from a different distributor or the original distributor starts to carry it again.

However that can be bad for SEO. Yes you can put in 301 redirects, but some stores just say "discontinued" on it and still post it. I agree, I wish there was a way to not show them in admin when you are working on the site.

However that can be bad for SEO. Yes you can put in 301 redirects, but some stores just say "discontinued" on it and still post it. I agree, I wish there was a way to not show them in admin when you are working on the site.

Doesn't matter tbh. 404s for discon items happens millions of times every day around the web. Delete em and forget em if they are defo not available anymore. If you have a recommended alternative you could do a custom 404 or link to the alternative,(long winded) but just to point to the alternative could be a bad idea as it could increase the bounce rate if the customer doesn't see what they expect to see, thus rendering the alternative low in googles eyes.

I use Google PPC so leaving them in the system could just cost me money when people click on discontinued item ads.

Take a look at this SEO add-on

With this add-on you can add a redirect link to each disabled product,

useful to solve the discontinued products issue.

Google will knock your rankings down quite a bit with a lot of 404 errors on your site. They do count against you. You should be able to turn your ads off for each item if that's they way you are advertising them. I would do a 301 redirect within cs cart or the discontinued product for as many as you can.

Google will knock your rankings down quite a bit with a lot of 404 errors on your site. They do count against you. You should be able to turn your ads off for each item if that's they way you are advertising them. I would do a 301 redirect within cs cart or the discontinued product for as many as you can.

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html

We used to delete the product until our SEO guy yelled at us. Now we move the product to a category called Discontinued Items. We change the product's price to zero. We setup cs-cart to show the Discontinued category and products, but not allow customers to add zero dollar items to cart.

David

Make it hidden. Add a "DISCOUNTINUED" to the title or description., track inventory and set it to zero so it can't be ordered. Everything stays in place. Customers know what's going on and remote links still work, you can still edit orders, everything continues to work but it's hidden in listings and can't be ordered.

Take a look at this SEO add-on

With this add-on you can add a redirect link to each disabled product,

useful to solve the discontinued products issue.

Can you set each product to direct to a different URL or is it just one page that they are all going to redirect to?

Can you set each product to direct to a different URL or is it just one page that they are all going to redirect to?

you can set for each product different URL

You can check out our SEO Ultimate addon. You can bulk assign different URL for each disabled product.

Hopefully you will not decide one day to remove very old orders or this new thing make data anonymous will not revert your products in stock, with customers making re order of order..

We used to delete the product until our SEO guy yelled at us. Now we move the product to a category called Discontinued Items. We change the product's price to zero. We setup cs-cart to show the Discontinued category and products, but not allow customers to add zero dollar items to cart.

David

Some old discontinued products I rebuild to new, other that has no value I delete, regenerate google sitemap and re submit it..

You should see if there are any incoming links to that page. If you just delete the product without a 301 you could be loosing some link juice. Over time you are bound to get incoming links which you will not have control of so deleting the page could loose a possible good link and affect your rankings.

Depends on product, I do not think ebay keeps history of sold products for too long. Most of my products are one of kind, it would be too problematic storing thousands of them..

You should see if there are any incoming links to that page. If you just delete the product without a 301 you could be loosing some link juice. Over time you are bound to get incoming links which you will not have control of so deleting the page could loose a possible good link and affect your rankings.

You should see if there are any incoming links to that page. If you just delete the product without a 301 you could be loosing some link juice. Over time you are bound to get incoming links which you will not have control of so deleting the page could loose a possible good link and affect your rankings.

this could do more harm than good depending on where you redirect to. Is someone lands on the page expecting to see a Giraffe and you try to sell them an elephant the bounce rate will be 100% which is bad for seo. If you redirect to an alternative giraffe then not so bad But still could increase bounce if customer needed a female giraffe and you pointed to male.

In this case 404 is best so it drops out and any "new" product is re crawled. 404 are not such a bad thing in googles eyes.

this could do more harm than good depending on where you redirect to. Is someone lands on the page expecting to see a Giraffe and you try to sell them an elephant the bounce rate will be 100% which is bad for seo. If you redirect to an alternative giraffe then not so bad But still could increase bounce if customer needed a female giraffe and you pointed to male.

In this case 404 is best so it drops out and any "new" product is re crawled. 404 are not such a bad thing in googles eyes.

So are you saying that a 404 has less bounce rate than a 301. I was assuming that basic seo was understood and you would not switch a page from selling Giraffe to selling Elephants. You cannot control the outside link which may be from a hi DA or PA. My suggestion was to find that out before just deleting pages. Every big site that I know puts a discontinued on an item so they do not loose incoming links.

Alternatively to John's suggestions, you could also 301 redirect to a category landing page and give a nice discontinued banner on that page. The banner could be dependent on a parameter. I.e. example.com/giraffes?_dq=1

where an html smarty block on the category landing pages could have smarty code of:

```php

{if $smarty.get._dq}

{** Your Discontinued banner here **}

{/if}

```php

If a parameter of _dq=non-zero-value is not found then the block would not dispaly You'd then get the SEO advantages of the key words on the giraffes listing.