When you take down a product from the inventory, your job is not done. eCommerce sites have to ensure that the product removal does not affect customer experience as well as relations with the third parties and vendors. So, here is the list of the top actions you need to take after removing a product from your eCommerce online store.
Inform The Third Party Services
As an eCommerce business owner, you need to outsource a lot of jobs to the third-party companies. After removing the product from the online store (or probably while planning the removal) you will want to inform the concerned parties. For example, if you allow the external vendors to list their products on your site and one such product needs to be taken down, you will need to notify the vendor that you will not sell the product.
If you take the supplies from a manufacturer and a certain product must be removed, you will need to inform the manufacturer that their services pertaining to that product will not be required. If you store your product in a third-party warehouse, you may need to tell them to remove the stocks to make space for other products.
Inform the Customers if Required
Whether you should inform the customer or not depends upon many factors and your personal choice as well. For example, if you are removing a popular product because you cannot sell it any further, it will be a good idea to inform the customers so that they do not leave your site disappointed. You may need to discontinue a popular product due to lack in supply or there could be a legal issue with the sale.
On the other hand, if you are removing a product that does not generate any significant sale, it will have no impact on your customer. The removal will go unnoticed and thus there will be no need to inform the customers.
Update Your eCommerce Website
This is one of the most important post-removal processes. When a product is added to an eCommerce site, many site aspects are incident to it. For instance, your website may have the recommendations mechanism whereby the customers see the site recommended products based on their purchase or browsing history. You will want to make sure that the product removed from the inventory also does not appear in the recommendations section. You will also need to ensure that the removal from recommendation does not leave an empty space and is replaced by another viable product.
You may also have several links to the products on the website. It is important to remove the broken links from customer experience as well as SEO perspective.
Another important thing you need to do is create a redirect for the URL. While you may have deleted the product page from your site, it will continue to appear in the search engines for quite a while. You will not want to leave the visitors baffled with broken links. It is also not good from SEO standpoint. 404 error pages are okay but you need to do more. If possible, redirect the customers to a product similar to the one you removed.
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