Customer satisfaction is a key consideration when selling products on websites like Shopify. One of the leading causes of customer dissatisfaction in eCommerce stores is being unable to buy a product when it’s sold out or no longer in business.
By hiding a product on Shopify, you’ll avoid frustrations that can disappoint your customers, making them look for another store.
Just in case you ever need to know, learn how to find the Shopify product ID.
Things to consider before starting: SEO damage can be caused!
When hiding a product page from your website, you will do some form of damage to the SEO if you don’t do it correctly. SEO is search engine optimization. If your page disappears, search engines will think there is an error and then stop ranking that page.
Look through the steps below and make sure that you have considered these to make sure you don’t lose anything ranking value.
Does your product page have any backlinks from other sites?
Backlinks
As you probably know already, backlinks from other relevant websites give ranking power to your whole website. Backlinks are one of the biggest ranking factors, and they provide your site with trust when getting backlinks from trusted websites.
If you hide your product from the web by removing the page, you will also lose any valuable backlinks in the process. If you remove the page, you will lose all link juice as well. There are two methods to get around this:
- Create a redirect from the product URL to another page on your site
- Don’t hide the page. Just mark the product as Out of Stock.
Option one will pass the link juice to another page; this helps your whole site rank and allow you to stay high up in the search results.
Option two will allow you to keep the page live but show customers that it is out of stock.
Internal links
Also, make sure that you are aware of internal links too. If you have other pages on your site linking to this product, you will need to either remove these links or create the redirect to avoid any 404 errors!
Inform search engines with a 410 code
It’s good practice to inform search engines that you have removed the page. The most popular method to this is marking the page with a 410 code. A 410 code basically tells search engines the page is purposely gone. That means they will not mark it as missing and know that you have deliberately done this.
You will need a developer or find a Shopify app that can add a 410 code to the product page.
How to hide a product on Shopify
- Log into your Shopify store and click “Products”.
- Tap on the product you want to hide.
- In the “Product status” box, click “Manage”.
- Uncheck the boxes for channels where you want to hide the product.
- Click the “Done” button to save your changes.
In this article, I’ll discuss some reasons that may force you to hide a product on Shopify. Keep reading to know why it’s essential to hide some Shopify products.
Reasons you would want to hide a Shopify product
You may wonder why a person wants to hide a product on Shopify. Well, here are some reasons:
The product is “Out of Stock”
When potential customers click on a product that’s out of stock, they’ll be taken to a page with an “Out-of-Stock” message. This usually happens when the product is no longer available or discontinued.
According to Search Engine Journal, most customers are frustrated by the “out-of-stock” messages, which affect the user experience. Thus, hiding such products in your Shopify store could be your best choice to avoid customer frustration and improve the overall user experience. But that’s up to you!
Learn how to mark your Shopify product out of stock.
The product is no longer relevant
Products become irrelevant for many reasons. It could be that the product is no longer in trend or has been replaced by a better version.
In such cases, maybe it’s better to hide the products from your Shopify store to avoid confusing customers who may want to purchase them. Just make sure you set a redirect from the URL to another page on your site to save SEO data.
Product suspension or deletion
Sometimes, Shopify may suspend or delete a product from your store. This usually happens when the product violates Shopify’s terms and conditions.
If this happens, it would be best to hide the products to avoid legal issues and create a redirect from the URL to another page on your site to save SEO data.
Automatically hide a product when out of stock
Shopify recently released a cool app called Shopify Flow.
This allows you to set up flows/automations to do specific tasks. You can basically tell Shopify to hide a product if the stock hits a specific amount. Learn more about Shopify flow and hiding products.
Key takeaways
Hiding a product on Shopify can save you a lot of headaches and improve the overall user experience. You don’t want your potential customers to shift to a different store due to situations that can be avoided by hiding a product. Therefore, if one of your Shopify products has an issue that may frustrate customers, consider hiding it as you solve the problem.
