Terminated Products Display

The Terminated Products Display feature improves how discontinued products are handled in the webshop.

Instead of showing a standard error page, terminated products can remain accessible via their original product URL and display a simplified product detail page with alternative product suggestions.

This helps prevent customer dead ends while preserving existing product URLs that may already have search visibility, external links, traffic, or saved customer bookmarks.

In this article:

• Overview
• Enabling the Feature
• Displaying Terminated Products in Admin
• SEO and Indexing
• Deleted vs. Terminated Products
• SEO Recommendation: Terminated Page vs. 301 Redirect
• FAQ

NOTE: This is a display-only feature. It does not change product status, stock management, or ordering capabilities.

Overview

When a customer opens the direct URL of a terminated product, for example from Google Search, an external link, or an old bookmark, the webshop displays a Limited Product Detail View instead of the standard “Product not available” message.

The page informs the customer that the product is no longer available and immediately offers Similar Products where available.

Limited View Layout

When a user visits the URL of a terminated product, the product detail page automatically switches to a Limited View layout:

• Purchasing Disabled – All commercial elements are removed, including:
  Add to Cart button | Prices | Availability information | Variants

• Design Tools Disabled – TronLogo (design/printing) buttons, printing options, and download sections are completely removed.

• Contact CTA – The primary “Buy” button is replaced with a “Contact Us” button that opens a standard inquiry form.

• Alternative-First Hierarchy – The Similar Products section is moved directly below the image gallery to immediately offer replacement options.

• Shifted Product Information – Technical parameters and product descriptions are displayed below the Similar Products section.

Safety Fallback

The system includes an automatic integrity check.

If a terminated product contains corrupted or incomplete data, for example, missing images or broken database records, the webshop automatically displays the standard error page instead of the Limited View layout.

This ensures that incomplete product details are not presented to customers.

Important Notes

• Search & Navigation – Terminated products remain hidden from category listings and internal webshop search. They are accessible only via direct URLs (e.g., Google results or saved bookmarks).

• URL Stability – Product URLs remain unchanged, helping preserve SEO value.

• Similar Products Logic – Alternative suggestions follow the existing system logic (automatic by category or manual linking). If no similar products are configured, the page will display only the termination notice and Contact button.

• Global Application – Once enabled, the feature applies to terminated products from all suppliers across the platform.

Enabling the Feature (Admin Portal)

1. Go to: Settings → Visual Settings → Product Detail

2. Scroll down to the TERMINATED PRODUCTS section

3. Enable the toggle "Display detail of terminated product"

Once enabled, the webshop will display the Limited View layout for all terminated products.

Viewing Terminated Products in Admin Catalog

To find terminated products in the Admin Portal:

1. Go to: Products → Product Catalog

2. Enable the filter checkbox: "Display terminated products"

The list will include terminated products and show a new Product State column

NOTE: This filter is for admin visibility only. It does not make terminated products purchasable.

SEO and Indexing

Terminated Products Display is designed to retain the original URL of a discontinued product while clearly indicating that the product is no longer available for purchase.

HTTP Status

When Display detail of terminated product is enabled, the terminated product detail page returns:

HTTP 200 OK

The page remains functional but uses the Limited Product Detail View instead of the regular purchasable product detail.

When the feature is disabled, the product is handled as unavailable/non-existent and the standard product error page or redirect behaviour applies.

Indexing and Meta Robots

Terminated product pages do not receive a noindex directive based on their product status.

They use the same meta robots configuration as regular active product pages:

index, follow

This means that search engines can continue to crawl and index an existing terminated product URL.

Canonical URL and hreflang

A terminated product page remains self-canonical.

The canonical points to the clean product URL for the currently selected language, without query parameters, in the same way as for an active product.

If the webshop uses multiple languages, hreflang alternates for the available language versions are also retained.

XML Sitemap

Terminated products are not included in the XML sitemap.

The product sitemap contains only products with the Active in sale status. When a product changes to terminated, its URL is removed from the sitemap during the next sitemap regeneration.

Removing the URL from the sitemap does not automatically make the page non-indexable. The terminated page can remain accessible and indexable even though it is no longer included in the sitemap.

Similar Products and Crawling

Similar Products displayed on the terminated product detail are rendered as standard HTML links (<a href>), so search engines can follow them.

Only active products are selected as Similar Products. The alternatives therefore do not link customers or search engines to another terminated product.

If no Similar Products are available, the page displays the termination notice and Contact button without product alternatives.

Deleted vs. Terminated Products

Catalogue and supplier products are not physically deleted from TronShop when they disappear from their source data in TronCloud.

During synchronization, the product status in the shop is changed to terminated, while the product record and its original URL remain stored in the webshop.

Therefore, if a catalogue/supplier product has been removed from the TronCloud source data, it is already handled as a terminated product in TronShop and Terminated Products Display can apply to it. There is no need to restore the product first.

There is no separate tool for restoring a deleted product as terminated because this is not required for the standard catalogue/supplier product workflow.

NOTE: This behaviour applies to catalogue/supplier products. Own shop products are not handled by the same synchronization cleanup process.

SEO Recommendation: Terminated Page vs. 301 Redirect

Terminated Products Display is particularly useful when a discontinued product does not have a clear direct replacement and retaining its existing URL provides value, for example because the URL already has:

• search visibility,
• external backlinks,
• organic traffic,
• customer bookmarks.

If a discontinued product has a clear direct successor or equivalent replacement, using a 301 redirect to the replacement product is generally the preferred SEO approach.

The redirect can be configured using the webshop's redirect table.

Avoid redirecting discontinued product URLs to unrelated products or categories simply to prevent a 404/error page. A redirect should lead to a genuinely relevant replacement.

Long-Term Search Visibility

Terminated products are no longer included in category listings, internal webshop search, the XML sitemap, or the Similar Products suggestions of other products.

As a result, the terminated page does not receive the same internal linking signals as an active product page.

Its search visibility may therefore naturally decrease over time. This is an expected consequence of keeping an unavailable product accessible without continuing to promote it throughout the webshop.

FAQ