Soft Disabling of Products

There is a major website in Australia which does this, which I think is a good idea.

For discontinued items that are no longer available, they don't completely disable it.  Instead, they leave the product on their website so that it can be found by search engines, but the item can't be found on their website in normal ways (eg. you can search for it on their website or it doesn't appear in the relevant category etc).

This way they are getting traffic from search engines and hopefully buyers will instead look for alternative products on their website.

Would this be a big task to do?

Hello,
I do this with the "out of stock" option.
So the article is there but you cannot buy it. The wording "out of stock" can be modify as you like, for example "Waiting for new serie" or what you prefer.
The difference is that the search engine of Litecart will find it, could this be a problem?

I have tried setting the "Sold Out Status" to "Sold Out" and the product can't be purchased. But it still appears in it's category in Litecart as well as with the Litecart search engine.  This is good if it's temporarily out of stock.  But not if it's never coming back in stock, as you don't want customers finding these products.

The website that has the soft disabling of products sells mobile phones and accessories. Through Google, you can still find phones and accessories on their website that are 10 years or more old that no one else sells.  With I guess thousands of different discontinued phones and accessories, this is a good way to get search engine traffic and hopefully convert some of it to current products.

Try setting a date valid to date.

@label

  <operation error="log">
    <search position="replace"><![CDATA[
        and (p.quantity > 0 or ss.hidden != 1)
    ]]></search>
    <add><![CDATA[
        and (p.quantity > 0)
    ]]></add>
  </operation>
</file>

Sold out item wont be visible , unless you search for it

Hi Tim,

I misread your post and used the "Date Valid From" date.  And this worked perfectly.  I changed the translations from "The product cannot be purchased until..." to "This item has been discontinued..."

And this results in:

• Item still being visible in Search Results
• Item still appearing in the XML Site Map
• Item is removed from the Google Shopping Feed
• Item can no longer be found to normal website visitors (not in the relevant category or with an internal search)
• A discontinued message being displayed to visitors

Thanks!