E-commerce: Taking care of expired product pages
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Hi,
I work for an e-commerce company in the fashion sector. As you probably know/can guess it is very popular for bloggers and other influencers to link to our products. But the problem is that our products often have a lifespan of only 2-3 months before they expire.
Is the best solution to do a 301-redirect to the closest category page for expiring product pages? To make sure we don't lose these links to 404-pages.
Or are there any other good solutions popular among e-commerce companys?
Thanks for taking your time!
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Those have been my main thoughts aswell. And you guys responses seem to agree with that. Thank you for your contribution!
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Since you have popular bloggers/sites linking to your products, it's definitely a good idea to think about user experience. If the site is out of stock of the original item, it may be smart to just link to overarching category (for example, if it's a t-shirt, redirect it to the "tops" page).
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In your case it may be worth it to do this: Keep the pages accessible, show that the product is no longer in stock and then show similar products the user may be interested in instead.
If this is not possible (too complicated, site too big), I would 301 redirect to the closest category page, maybe with a notification at the top that the product is no longer available and that is why the user was redirected to the category page.
Have a look at this blog post: https://econsultancy.com/blog/65562-seo-considerations-for-discontinued-products-in-ecommerce/
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