If your website removes out-of-stock or discontinued products by, for example, converting the URLs from those products to 404 Not Found pages, you might find that these products still appear in your product recommendations.
Why this happens
When a customer browses a product on-site, our script updates the product database in our platform with the data we capture, in order to keep our database up-to-date. However, if the product gets removed from the site, then our script can’t update the product in our product database in order to let us know that it is out of stock or discontinued.
The product is only removed from our product database by the auto-deletion process which removes products that have not been updated in the past 30 days.
If you need to remove a product before the auto-deletion process detects it, there are two methods that you can use to update our records in order to reflect the change on-site.
Solutions
1. Manually update the product record
It's possible to manually set a product as out of stock or delete a product from the product database.
To do this:
Go to Reports > All Reports > System data.
Select Products.
Enter the Product ID as captured by our script or search for the name of the product you want to remove.
Once you've found the record, underneath the product information, you have two options:
Expand the Stock Status drop-down menu at the bottom of the left hand product information panel and select Out of stock. This removes the product from recommendations, unless the recommendation is set to display out of stock products
or
Select the delete icon above the product image to remove it entirely from the database.
2. Use a product import
Before you start
You must have access to the Data Import module to use this option. To discuss, contact your Account Manager.
If you need to automate this process, or you have a number of products you need to mark as out of stock, then you can set up a Product Import.
Learn more in Import Product data.