When it comes to discontinuing a product in eCommerce, what should you do about its product page? After all, disabling its SKU will mean customers and site crawlers will hit a 404 error when navigating to the product. Is there a way to preserve the page value for your business, or should you let it 404 and move on?
Firstly, you’ll need to determine whether your product is out of stock or discontinued.
An out of stock product simply means there is further stock expected. The product may be popular at that moment, leading to an increase in sales and resulting in it only temporarily being out of stock. The manufacturer will provide further stock for this in the near future.
A discontinued product is one where you aren’t expecting further stock. This happens when the product has reached the end of its life cycle. It’s at that point where you’ll need to decide what to do with its product page on your eCommerce site.
When a product is no longer unavailable, there are several paths you can take for its product page. The route taken will often depend on a number of factors, such as the page’s popularity and the size of your eCommerce product catalogue.
The first option is to do nothing. Removing the product SKU will result in showing a 404 error page if someone accesses it. Google will still crawl the page, but after several attempts and hitting the 404 response, Google will remove it from its search index (and therefore results).
Alternatively, when discontinuing a product in eCommerce, you could disable the product and set up a 301 redirect. This means going into your website’s CMS backend (Magento, Adobe Commerce, Shopify etc) and diverting its webpage traffic to a replacement product page, related category page or homepage.
The final option when discontinuing a product in eCommerce is to keep the product page live but point customers to an alternative using an update message. Whilst this isn’t common, it’s useful to do this if the product has been superseded by another - such as with spare parts. This works by placing an alert on the original product page to outline that the product is no longer available, often alongside the updated alternative. The benefit is that the original product page is kept alive and continues to bring in traffic (e.g. for an old party number).
Removing a product from your eCommerce site will often be because it’s reached its end of life, or you’ve chosen to focus on alternatives. You should then be asking yourself several questions to determine if you should use option 1 and allow it to 404. The biggest one is…
If your eCommerce business provides a large number of products, e.g. measured in thousands of SKUs, then letting a product page 404 is perfectly normal. This is because the SKU as a percentage of the total products and pages removed is small. Teams need to move quickly too, so manually intervening on a per product basis is time consuming.
Alternatively, if your eCommerce business provides a relatively small catalogue of products (say… less than 50 vs. 5,000+), then a 301 direct or updated product page would be appropriate. Not only does fewer products impact a higher catalogue percentage for small businesses, but also the overall maintenance for these pages is far less. Directing customers to other products has far more impact in this scenario.
When discontinuing a product in eCommerce, enabling a 404 is not always the best answer.
By disabling a product page, you could be harming your search engine rankings. This is because the product page will no longer appear in search queries such as those in Google, meaning page traffic will simply stop. If you sell other, similar products, then you could circumvent this by redirecting visitors to them to encourage a sale and minimise the impact on your search engine rankings.
So, here are a few key questions that will help decide when not to 404 a page.
If your product page brings in significant traffic, then it’s worth considering a 301 redirect or to keep it live with new messaging.
There are many reasons for higher page traffic, such as the price, time of year, or… if the product is trending with influencers. There are many factors for high page volume that may be out of your control, but the page will still receive numerous visitors. In this scenario, you could still encourage sales elsewhere on your eCommerce site if you leave the page live. Just make it clear that the product of initial interest has been discontinued, if that is the case.
External backlinks can help the page and the overall site rank well, as eCommerce SEO teams work hard to gain backlinks from reputable sites for page Search Engine Optimisation. If you 404 a page, the benefit is lost, undoing the hard-earned value any external or internal links bring. By putting in a redirect to an alternative, product, category or homepage, the value is largely preserved.
There are many tools that can help measure external backlinks that 404, if in doubt. For example, ahrefs has a specific ‘broken backlinks' report that helps you run an analysis to see which pages have backlinks that are going to 404. If the page has backlinks from reputable sites and ranks well in search engines as a result, then it may be worth providing a 301 page redirect to preserve their value.
If the product has been superseded by another, which can often happen with component or spare parts, then a percentage of people will be unaware of this and still search for the previous part name or number. In this scenario, your product page may still rank for that part name or number, bringing in traffic. This is where keeping the page live and linking to the new part, or a 301 redirect, would be beneficial compared to a 404.
Whether you should 404 a product page will often come down to evaluating the data you have on the products in question. Every eCommerce business will have a different method to do this, such as from an ERP system, CMS, custom tool and so on. Whatever the case, this should be analysed before making a decision, otherwise you could harm your SEO.
Once you have made the choice to discontinue a product page with either a 404 or a redirect, make sure it’s removed from any categories on your site. There’s also the possibility that the discontinued page is a category page itself, meaning it should be removed from any menus and on-site backlinks.
Our team of experienced eCommerce web developers can help implement your chosen method of discontinuing each product. If you’re looking for a professional approach to website development from a UK-based agency, then please get in touch with us at magic42.
