What to do with out-of-stock products
LightSEO · Catalog
What to do with out-of-stock products
Delete, hide or keep? This decision determines whether you keep the traffic a page has built up or hand it over to competitors.
0
deleted pages with traffic
1
redirect when a product won't return
Scenarios
Three situations and three solutions
The product is temporarily sold out. We keep the page open. An "out of stock" label, a "notify me when available" button and a block of similar products.
The product won't return, but there is a replacement. We set up a 301 redirect to an equivalent product or to the category. The page's weight passes to a live URL.
The product won't return and there is no replacement. You can keep the page with an explanation and links to the category, or return a 410.
Mistakes
What to avoid
🗑
Deleting the page
The accumulated weight and traffic disappear along with it. It hurts most when the item ranked at the top.
🙈
Simply hiding it
The page starts returning 404, and the number of errors in Search Console grows.
🔀
Redirecting everything to the homepage
The worst option: the search engine treats it as a soft 404 and simply drops the page from the index.
Benefit
How to benefit from an out-of-stock product
Capture demand. "Notify me when available" turns a lost order into a contact for your mailing list.
Offer alternatives. A "similar products" block on the page of an unavailable item often saves the order.
Keep empty items out of sight in the catalog. Out-of-stock products are better moved to the bottom of the category instead of shown first.
Have many products gone out of stock and taken your traffic with them?
We will put things in order: redirects for discontinued items and demand capture for temporarily unavailable ones.
