Using Discontinued Products to Drive $100K+ in Incremental Sales

Challenge

When a routine web content traffic report showed that the 404 error page had suddenly become one of the top visited pages, we discovered that the share of traffic to the 404 error page had been slowly increasing over time.

Nearly all (70%+) of the 404 error page traffic was attributed to URLs for discontinued products that had been offlined. And with ~100 SKUs discontinued annually, the number of URLs leading to the 404 error page would only increase.

Our SEO agency recommended that we 301 redirect the URLs of discontinued products to their respective category page. From an SEO perspective this made sense, but I didn’t feel that this was an acceptable user experience as there would be no way for users to know, if we just redirect them to a category page, that the product they were interested in was no longer available.

Solution

Rather than 301 redirect the URLs of discontinued products, or continue to have them 404, I worked with our team to do something that I think should be a lot more common in ecommerce. We re-activated over 700 discontinued product URLs, but with a twist.

First, here is an example of what a regular, active product page looked like.

Discontinued products would also use this template, but with 3 key distinctions:

• They would, obviously, not be listed on the category page. The only way to access them would be through organic search or direct link.

• At the top of the page, via a red alert bar, the user was notified that the product is discontinued.

• Just underneath that, it recommended an active, in-stock replacement SKU.

Results

Overall, this project was a big win on a number of fronts.

• Replacement SKU upsells generated nearly $100K in revenue annually.

• Nearly all of the 404 page traffic (that we could control) was eliminated.

• From an SEO perspective, retaining these pages ensured that pages continued to rank even for older products which were still generating searches.

Takeaways

• It’s tempting to just turn off product pages that are no longer sellable. But depending on the type of products you sell, there may be ways to leverage them into opportunities

• Users don’t know when your products are discontinued, and may be still be reading about them on blogs, social media, or other communities.