Handling Out of Stock products

[Bsnrjones]

My store carries over 4,500 items, and we usually have around 3,500+ items in stock. That means that there could be as many as 1,000 items out of stock.

My delima is how to handle these out of stock items. Do I allow them to be shown, or not. I have modded the cart to show quantity available for each item.

The problem is that if I set the cart to not show out of stock items, and the search engine happened to pick up the page when the item was in stock the visitor ends up at an empty page that says this product is not available - if the product is now out of stock.

So what is everyone else doing? I would be really interested to hear some feedback on this issue.

Burke

[SWILLIAMS]

I hide the buy now button for items that are out of stock, This might work for you.

[Anonymous]

how can you hide the buy now button?