I was looking for competitors pricing on a couple of our products and found a site which had discontinued one of the items, but it was still showing in the search engines. When you went to that page the product was shown with description etc, but instead of a buy button and options it had a note to say it was discontinued.
The advantages of this are obvious, when you discontinue a product the page can still be there for the search engines and so you get visitors entering your site.
So I have set this up in VP and I thought others might like it.
Essentially you hide the product as before, but I have set up the shopexd file so that instead of making hidden products go to the shoperror, they still go to the shopexd file.
Here's how:
In shopexd replace
If catalogid<>"" then
Sql="select * from products where catalogid=" & catalogid & " and hide = 0"
else
sql="select * from products where ccode='" & ccode & "' and hide = 0"
end if
withIf catalogid<>"" then
Sql="select * from products where catalogid=" & catalogid
else
sql="select * from products where ccode='" & ccode
end if
this removes the condition that a product must not be hidden.
Then at the end of the GetTemplate sub enterif tmpRS("hide")<>False then
template="tmp_tmp_product.htm"
end if
You need to create the product templates (in this example I've called it tmp_tmp_product.htm.
As an example, if you go to http://www.temptationsdirect.co.uk/shopexd.asp?id=7182 you will see that you can't buy the item, but it is available as search engine fodder.
Just thought this nugget may help some you out there.
Steve
Sex toys from a UK sex shop including vibrators and dildos.