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Inactive and Archived products can still be purchased from the website
Inactive and Archived products can still be purchased from the website

How did a customer place an order for a SKU that is marked as Inactive or has been moved to the Archive?

Ned Creed avatar
Written by Ned Creed
Updated over a week ago

This article relates to websites with an open cart sales module.

If a product has been offered for sale at some point on your website and you used a direct hyperlink in an email campaign for customers to click and access that product, when it was active...that link is still out there, either in an email in a customer's inbox, as part of a pdf, available/presented on a social media post, etc.

So even if that product is now inactive on your website, the URL does still exist in the world of the internet.

Beyond your presentation of that product via a hyperlink, there might even be a situation where Google has picked up that product (URL) in search results or a customer copy and pasted the URL and emailed it to a friend to buy or posted it on their own social media accounts. All this can happen without your control.

Therefore, you have to be vigilant. If there is inventory still present in that SKU, and it is marked as Inactive or even Archived in your Figure admin account, that link in an email or on social media will still connect if clicked on by a customer—and they will be able to place an order!

There is one of two things you would need to do in order to keep "Inactive" and even "Archived" products from being sold, to fully shut down that SKU:

-Remove all remaining stock from that SKU. That is the number one way to keep customers from placing orders via accessing the product from past hyperlinks, social media posts, Google search results, etc.

-Change the Product Availability. If you need to keep inventory numbers intact, the other option is inside the product details page, under "Product Availability" you should mark it as "Not For Sale".

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