What happens when the product at a shopping portal goes out of stock?

Today, ecommerce is at its peak. Buying and selling are happening at full swing. Shopping and portals have become an ideal virtual location of shopping. You click, view, pay and the product is yours. Coming to the flipside, what happens to the page when the particular product is no longer available? This post will talk about what you can do once your product is no more available for sale and how you can still use it.

According to Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam – A lot of factors depend on how many products are there in your page and what is the probability of them to stay at the page. For instance, fashion & lifestyle products, home décor and others have a high chance to become unavailable in no time. How pages catering ecommerce products should be like? This question also depends on the discounted products and if they outnumber the general products. Let’s take a look at the situations and what can be done:

1. Small sized ecommerce: If your portal deals with small number of products then you can use the inactive pages to navigate the clients to those items which are in stock by making suggestions on other items which they may like.

2. Mid- sized ecommerce: In case, you have hundreds of pages, you can do a 404 for products that are no longer available. It’s ideal to remove the pages than annoy the visitors. Though, if there are chances that the item will come back then it is better to keep the page up and let the visitors realize that the product is unavailable temporarily.

3. Gigantic ecommerce: With huge ecommerce portals, there are chances that the products frequently become unavailable. You are suggested to use Meta Tag, ‘unavailable after,’ which explains Google not to index the page after a particular date.