Gone for good: discontinued is not out of stock

Most catalogues carry a product nobody has sold in months. Not low stock, not waiting on a supplier. Actually finished. The manufacturer stopped making it, you dropped it for a line with a better margin, or it simply sat in the bodega until you gave the shelf to something that moves.

The trouble is that your catalogue still says "out of stock", the same label you use for something arriving on Thursday's delivery. To a sari-sari store owner scrolling the buyer portal at closing time, those two situations look identical. They are not.

A gap between "not now" and "not ever"

Out of stock does a lot of work in wholesale in the Philippines. It covers a shipment sitting at the pier waiting for a boat, a delivery that missed its window because of truck ban hours, a supplier who has not sent anything since the road flooded. Every one of those is a promise with a date attached, even a rough one. The product is coming back and the buyer only has to wait or ask again next week. That is useful information and it is worth showing.

Discontinued has no date. Nothing is coming back. Leaving it under the same "out of stock" pill tells the buyer to keep checking on something that will never change, and the habagat months make that worse, not better. A buyer who has spent a week hearing that stock is stuck behind weather will believe a dead product is simply delayed too, and go on waiting for something you stopped carrying in March.

The fix is not complicated. It is a second label, used honestly. One flag means "wait a bit". The other means "stop waiting, this one is gone". A buyer who can see the difference stops rechecking a dead product and starts looking at what replaced it, which is a better outcome for both of you.

Why a sari-sari store keeps ordering it anyway

A discontinued product that stays visible does not fade quietly. It keeps generating orders, because a buyer who has ordered it for two years has no reason to think otherwise. It stays on the handwritten list she hands the field agent, and in every reorder she copies from the last one. You catch it when you process the order, and now you are sending a message explaining, again, that it is not coming back. Multiply that by every suki who had it on her standing list and a product you stopped carrying months ago is still costing you conversations every week.

Some of that is unavoidable. A buyer will always want the thing she is used to. Most of it is avoidable, though, because most of it comes from the catalogue not saying clearly enough that the item is gone. A product that looks orderable gets ordered. A product marked discontinued, with a short note on what replaced it, gets ordered far less, and the conversations that follow are shorter.

Take it off the price list, not out of the record

The instinct when a product is finished is to delete it. Resist that. Deleting the line loses the price history, which you will want later, whether for your own records or for a buyer asking what she paid for it last year.

What you actually want is to stop a buyer adding it to a new order while keeping it exactly as it was in the old ones. Anyone looking at a past order should still see the item at the price agreed at the time: the ₱1,180 case is still a ₱1,180 case on the order where it was bought. Nobody placing a new order should be able to select it. That distinction, active for ordering versus present in the history, is the whole difference between a clean catalogue and a price list nobody fully trusts.

Give buyers a next best thing

A discontinued item rarely leaves a genuine gap. Most of the time you already carry something close: a different size, a different brand, the same thing in a case of 24 instead of 12. The moment you mark a product gone is also the moment to point at what takes its place.

This does not need to be automatic or clever. A single line in the product description, "replaced by [item]", does most of the work. A buyer who looks for the old item and lands straight on its replacement never has to send a message asking what happened to it. You have answered the question before she thought to ask it. It also saves your field agent explaining the same change at every stop along the route.

Do it the day you decide, not the day someone complains

The easiest time to mark a product discontinued is the moment you decide to stop carrying it, not the week a buyer finally asks why it never arrives. Wait too long and you spend that time answering the same question from every regular buyer, one at a time, instead of answering it once in the catalogue itself.

The same applies on the supply side. If your own supplier tells you a line is being dropped, that is the signal to update your catalogue that day, not whenever the last case sells through. And if there is a clean-up you have been putting off, do it before the ber months rather than during them. Nobody wants to be explaining a dead product in the week everyone is stocking up for Christmas. A catalogue that reflects what you can actually deliver, right now, is worth more to a buyer than one that is merely optimistic.

Where goodport fits

In goodport, a product can be marked discontinued separately from in stock, low, or out. A discontinued item drops out of the buyer portal's order flow straight away, so it cannot land on a new order by accident, while every past order that included it keeps its original price and quantity untouched in the order history.

You can also link a discontinued product to its replacement, so a buyer looking for the old item is pointed at the one you actually want her ordering, with no message back and forth.

If your catalogue still lists products that quietly stopped selling months ago, book a demo and we will look at cleaning it up together.