[ic] Discontinued items woes

Peter peter at pajamian.dhs.org
Thu Sep 18 22:35:17 UTC 2008


On 09/18/2008 03:07 PM, Stefan Hornburg (Racke) wrote:
> Peter wrote:
>> On 09/18/2008 11:27 AM, Stefan Hornburg (Racke) wrote:
>>> Hello, folks!
>>>
>>> Products in an online store may change regularly, depending on the business. 
>>> Customers might now be aware of it, due to several possible reasons:
>>>
>>> * "race" conditions, product just removed or deactivated
>>> * stale pages in search engines or price compare sites
>>> * pages on affilates's sites
>> How can we differentiate these from things that do indicate an 
>> improperly configured catalog or improperly populated database such as:
>>
>> * Variants table not set in the ProductFiles directive
>> * Variants not populated for a p[articular item
>> * Variants generated with the wrong codes
>>
> 
> Do we really need to differentiate that? You are responsible for correct
> configuration and database population. Also, it wouldn't hurt to
> show a boilerplate message in these cases.

Your proposal indicates that we should say what caused the problem:

> In this situation you want to let the customer know about what happened,
> like
> 
> "Sorry, this product sold off. Please click here for similar products."

I'm not sure how we can do that without differentiating and telling the 
customer that a product has been discontinued when in fact the error is 
due to a mis-configuration of the catalog can be detrimental.

Peter




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