Posted on March 20, 2014 by admin
Most ecommerce site owners are puzzled with the products that are no longer available on the site. What can be done to these product pages? Can a 404 error page always work for you? Showing “out of stock” also hurts the site; especially, if the product pages are ranking high on the search engines. Considering that the number of products added on a daily or weekly basis differs from site to site, it is important that a small website has a different solution to this problem than a big site.
For the likes of Craiglist that get updated with thousands of products or businesses every day need a solution that is completely different than an ecommerce site that has a turnover of a few hundreds or even less. If your website is medium, that is, it has only a few hundreds to thousands turnover, then the solution has to be somewhere in the middle.
Google’s Matt Cutts offers a solution for the unavailable products to all the small, medium and big ecommerce sites.
If you have a small ecommerce website with a few product pages, mostly fewer than 100, then you need to avoid using 404 error page. Your customer can actually turn away from the site in this manner. One can use the concept of related products in this case. If you direct your customers to a page with a similar product instead, then it can actually work as a good strategy. In this manner, you offer something similar or something related to the customer. This is by far, the best option when it comes to replacing the “out of stock” notice to the customer which can be really annoying.
There are many average ecommerce sites that have products either going temporarily out of tock for a week or more or at times, products are taken off completely as in case of antique products that are once sold cannot be replenished on the site. One can use a 404 error page in this case. However, it is important not to show a blank 404 page. One can have a customized error page that has a link to the home page, some related products and also popular products to interest the visitors.
A major ecommerce website of the likes of Craiglist can use a special meta tag that automatically tells Google that the page is no longer of use. This meta tag works as a automated deadline and the page is removed from Google search results. The meta tag, unavailable_after, is used for the biggest ecommerce sites and is a good option for online stores with a turnover of over thousands.