What You Don't Have, Don't Show

A customer messages you through your website asking about the haircut style they saw three months ago, or tries to pay the deposit on a three-tier cake you don't make anymore. You don't have that anymore. The problem isn't that you don't have it: it's that your website still said you did.

That's where the question comes up: do you pull the listing the moment you stop offering something, or leave it up for a while in case it comes back? The answer depends on whether you're talking about the listing or the payment button. And that distinction is what actually keeps you out of trouble.

What you can't charge for, you can't show with a button

Picture a hair salon where the stylist who did perms leaves. The service is still on the price list, with its booking button. Someone books it, pays the deposit, and on the day of the appointment you have to call to cancel and refund the money.

That refund isn't just the money. It's time on the phone, a customer left with the sense that your website isn't up to date, and if they paid by card, a possible chargeback that you're the one who has to deal with. All because you didn't delete a listing that had been sitting there, unused, for weeks.

The rule isn't "update the whole catalog every week." It's narrower than that: the same day something stops being available to pay for, you pull the payment or booking button. The listing, the photo, the text, can wait a while. The charge can't.

The moment to review isn't a day on the calendar

You don't need a monthly reminder to go through the whole catalog. The moments when something stops being available are few and easy to spot: your supplier changes, someone leaves the team, the season ends, a batch runs out and you're not restocking it.

Every time one of those four things happens, the first step is opening your dashboard and checking which listings depended on it. Not all of them, just the ones that touch it. If your chatbot answers pricing automatically, as covered in Let the Chatbot Answer the Price, You Only Step In to Close the Sale, an outdated listing doesn't get fixed by the chatbot for you: it just keeps repeating it exactly as you left it.

What to do with the page if you delete it entirely

If the listing had its own address within your website and you delete it outright, anyone who lands on it from a search or a saved link hits a page that doesn't exist. You don't need to rebuild it from scratch: just keep the page live, remove the price and the button, and swap the text for a short line saying it's no longer available and where to text if they're still interested.

That applies just as much to a repair shop that stopped servicing a certain appliance brand, or a photographer who dropped wedding shoots to focus on product photography. The page stays up, the wording changes, and it keeps doing its job of redirecting whoever asks, instead of charging for something you no longer do.

In Yodai the store comes with the Free plan, with a catalog, a cart and orders. See how to create your online store for free.