What to do with sold product pages when everything you sell are unique one off items

[Scottlinklater]

Hi there,

This is something i have been unsure of for years. It's a little different to most ecom website  situations. What would you do with product pages when every product is a "one off" unique product and once sold will never be for sale again?

Should i redirect to a category page? 404? Leave it as is marked as sold or say it is sold and show links to similar items?

At the moment we have 700 products for sale but over 5000 sold products that have their own product page and my concern is as this grows it could become a lot for a WordPress woocommerce site to handle?

I don't want to do anything to slow my site down or unnecessarily bloat it but i want to do the right thing by the visitor and also not do anything to hurt my rankings.

These pages often rank in google and may have been there for years before the item actually sells. To throw another curve ball, there may be multiple other products (for sale or already sold) with the exact same name but are unique and different from each other.

These products pages will often be 98% the same content as each other too.

To explain how this could be the case, we sell artworks from many different artists, Every artwork is an original and is unique. But many artists paint the same subject matter multiple times, albeit in a slightly different way from previous times.

So you end up with a unique product that has everything the same as another (same artist, same name of artwork, same size, same description, different image, different sku)  but is actually different and unique.

This has left me somewhat uncertain of what is best to do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

[ahislop574]

We also have problems. For example, on the page [https://www.fitness-china.com/back-machine](https://www.fitness-china.com/back-machine "lat pulldown"), we have many **Lat Pulldown**. They are all products that **exercise back muscles**. Every year we release new products. Such products are also included. Need to write different product descriptions.

[GFD_Chris]

Without being able to see the site, here are some steps I would recommend taking:

1. 404 all sold products
2. Ensure users must enter unique titles, descriptions, images. Even if they create something similar, these aspects could be unique
3. Show "Similar Products" for all sold pieces

Redirecting technically isn't the best practice unless the destination is very similar. As well, this will slow down your site's server response times if done at scale. Allowing them as 200 status codes will create a lot of duplicate content it seems.

If you send the site, I could take a further look here!