best practice on selling a single item?

[Bill S]

I've been reading through the discontinued items threads with great interest as I have to deal with this as well. Having just moved to 3Dcart a month ago and gone live a few days ago I have a pretty clean store right now. 3 pages of 301 redirects and bye bye to the old cart.

Right now I'm not too concerned with discontinued items but I do have another regular issue that I deal with. Factory seconds. Items that don't pass cosmetic inspection but are still usable as is and sold at a discount price. So seconds are avoided but happen sooner or later. My old method was to have a few records set up for the seconds and just change the details and images depending on what was being sold. Of course this muddies up the data on how many defects one has and on what product.

So with 3dcart space is not an issue. I figured that I would just make a mirror record of every item that can have a possible factory second. Set inventory to 1 and that is that.
The questions start when that item is sold. I don't want to leave the record in view unless the item is available. Once sold if I select hide and not for sale it's some what like a discontinued item. If I did a redirect to the mirror record of the 100% version all is well as far as google and 404's and such.

The real question in my mind is this. 3 months later I have another of that same item as a factory second. If I un-hide it, un-check the not for sale and set inventory to 1 would I also have to delete the redirect record? Or would the fact that the item is back and active void the redirect?

[lukiegames]

You would definitely need to delete the redirect. That's separate from everything else.

You could also look at using Advanced Options for those products, which would keep the variations (factory seconds) on the same product page when you have them. That adds some complexity, since you'd have to manage advanced option inventory and pricing, but it would avoid the need for redirects and frequent hiding/unhiding. I don't know if you would want those to appear on the same product page as your normal, new items though.

[Bill S]

You would definitely need to delete the redirect. That's separate from everything else.

Thanks.. just knowing that helps in how I'll deal with this issue. It's not a daily event so deleting the redirect when I have a new item in is not a crisis. And no, all factory seconds go in there own category. I have customers that ask when I'll get more seconds in just because they love the lower price and are willing to deal with small cosmetic issues.