Hi @kwestport. I think I can give you a few ideas for future items. For the ones that are already “out there,” though, the problem is bigger than Square, I’m afraid. First, something to know.
Once an item page (or any web page, really) is published, even if it were to be subsequently marked hidden/unavailable, the item would be subject to being archived in the Wild West of the internet. It takes a while for web crawlers and web archives to notice page deletions and remove them from their searches — a long while, in my experience.
For the items you already have already added but aren’t yet available for sale online, the only recourse that will really work is to set their inventory to zero. That way, even if someone were to find them through your SEO in a web search, at least they wouldn’t be able to order those items. Of course, that means you are going to have to manually set or upload true inventory the night before you actually make those items live in your store.
In the future, you have two approaches. You can add the items to your catalog and set their inventory to zero initially, then do the same procedure outlined above the night before those items go live. Or, you can create an upload Excel file of your new items, but not upload those to your item catalog until the night before you go live with them. If it were me, I’d lean to the latter, but I don’t know your store.
You could to have them physically delete an item page when you mark it unavailable/hidden, then publish it again when you mark it unavailable. The downside to that would be that while it was hidden, if someone found the item in a web search and clicked on it, it would take them to a 404 Error page, which is not exactly ideal. This is one of the quirks of the world-wide web that isn’t easy to get around, I’m afraid. It wasn’t built with the kind of e-commerce we do today in mind. Ugh.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Regards,
Chip A.
Square Expert & Innovator and member of the Square Champions group. (But NOT a Square employee, just a seller like you)
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