Discontinued Products - Best Practices

How do your site handle discontinued product pages?

[pdivi]

When a user requests a page for a discontinued product on my site, they are forwarded to a special page with a "sorry" message. I am looking to change this with an eye towards...
- preserving "link juice" from old backlinks to the discontinued products
- providing suggestions for related products / other ways to keep the user on the site

Any ideas, suggestions?

[Alternative Future]

I have seen sites use:
SOLD OUT
This product has been sold out. This may come back again in future, we recommend you check the website regularly.

This is written in red. And all the product details are still kept in place...

HTH

-Gs

[rj87uk]

If you do a search you will find several threads on this matter. Like Alternative Future says clearly state that the product has sold out and that you may get it back in stock so check back (Get their Email address perhaps?).

I would also have related products and see if you can get them to buy something related instead.

RJ

[buckworks]

Be honest with your users. "Discontinued" is different from "sold out". If the item is permanently gone, don't pretend it might be available again. Even if that theoretically might happen, the user is shopping NOW.

"Related products" is a much better idea than "keep checking back" when products are discontinued.

[HRoth]

Yes, I would not like to keep checking back on something that was actually discontinued. When I discontinue something, I write "Discontinued" where the add to cart button used to be and often try to give a reason why (became too difficult to get, was dangerous, price rose into stratosphere, quality dropped, whatever). But I keep the page up to keep the links in and put it outside of my normal prev > next series and take its link off my index page(s). You can then find the page with a search or be drawn to my site by finding the page on search engines, but you can't just shop on the site and find it. Long time ago I tore down some pages for discontinued items and I still get 404s for them, so now I leave everything up.

[Wlauzon]

Depends on the item. For most we just say that the product is discontinued, but for some we use a line something like "this product has been replaced by xx" or "this item is very similar".