In e-commerce, “zombie products” refer to products that a company continues to support and maintain, spending resources on, but that customers rarely buy. These zombie products—often spare parts, old stock, or niche items—remain available but are typically only found through direct links or special inquiries. With the same type of naming convention, we also have "graveyard products", these are your no longer sold items that you want to keep on your web for various reasons although they are no longer purchasable at all.
When left unmanaged, these products can weigh down your commerce stack, leading to sluggish performance and a suboptimal user experience.
But what if you could keep your commerce engine lean, your indexes clean and your recommendations mean? This can be solved by letting your commerce engine and supporting systems focus exclusively on active products, while offloading inactive product data elsewhere.
You don’t need them - but you can’t afford to kill them
Even though these products are no longer part of your active sales catalog or rarely purchased, they remain critical for customers searching for past purchases, warranties, or technical specifications. Removing these products entirely could frustrate customers and disrupt their journey, especially if they are seeking essential but hard-to-find items.
Maintaining product detail pages for inactive items ensures your site continues benefiting from search traffic. Removing them could damage SEO rankings and cause broken links, leading to a poor user experience. These pages also serve as great landing pages to guide customers to active products!
Another emerging factor is the digital product passport (DPP) regulations. As part of the EU's sustainability initiatives, the DPP will soon require businesses to store detailed information about their products—including materials, origin, and environmental impact—accessible even after a product is no longer sold. By separating inactive product data from the commerce system, businesses can meet these regulatory requirements and maintain visibility for search engines, all while ensuring e-commerce remains optimized for transactions.
The hidden technical and financial cost of managing inactive product in your commerce engine
For many businesses, the tendency is to store all product data—both current and past—within their various commerce systems. This can quickly become problematic as the number of inactive products grows. Over time, the sheer volume of non-essential products slows down these platforms, making it harder to deliver a smooth and speedy user experience. This includes longer load times, sluggish search responses, and less relevant recommendations.
Some commerce engines charge based on the number of SKUs, indexed items, or products featured in campaigns. As your catalog grows—whether with active, inactive, or zombie products—the cost of maintaining your commerce stack increases.
By keeping inactive products in these systems, you’re essentially paying for data that no longer generates revenue, but still incurs costs. Managing inactive product content outside the commerce system or search engine can drastically reduce these costs. It allows businesses to scale their commerce stack more efficiently, offloading search engines and recommendation engines, and keeping their focus where it matters most—on the active products driving transactions.
How Occtoo’s Experience Data Platform Solves the Problem
Occtoo’s Experience Data Platform unifies content and product data from multiple sources—such as PIM, ERP, CRM, and DAM—allowing businesses to access and manage all data from one centralized place. For companies dealing with millions of products, including those no longer available for sale, this provides a powerful opportunity to streamline operations while maintaining high performance.
Instead of overwhelming your commerce system with outdated or inactive product data, Occtoo lets you store and manage product content separately. This means that your commerce engine, search indexes, and recommendation engines only handle active products and is only burdened with just the right data that they need for their operations, significantly lightening their load. By offloading inactive product data, you reduce strain on search functions, improving overall system responsiveness and user experience. As a result, customers encounter faster load times, smoother search results, and more relevant recommendations.
Occtoo is built to handle and serve large amounts of data efficiently for any front-end. In addition to optimizing your commerce system, why not further streamline your operations by allowing Occtoo to manage all your Product Detail Pages for any product you've ever sold? Occtoo’s Experience APIs allow businesses to create product-specific endpoints that serve content to the frontend in milliseconds, ensuring a seamless browsing experience. Data loaded into an Occtoo Destination has one purpose only; to be scaled and delivered fast anywhere in the world. Whether it’s a product detail page for an active item, semi-active or one that’s no longer sold, users can still access the content without any performance degradation.
For zombie products, consider dynamically onboarding the relevant product data into the commerce engine only when the product is added to a user’s basket. This minimizes the strain on the commerce stack and ensures that resources are allocated efficiently.
When a customer adds a zombie product to their cart, the relevant data is pushed to the commerce engine through Occtoo’s Experience APIs. This triggers actions such as real-time stock checks, shipping cost calculations, and estimated delivery times from external suppliers or third-party logistics (3PL) providers. By delaying the onboarding of zombie products until the moment they are needed, you avoid straining your commerce engine with rarely accessed data, optimizing performance.
Additionally, this method helps businesses reduce costs by not loading inactive product data into systems until it's necessary. Instead of counting zombie products towards SKU-based licensing costs, these products remain outside the commerce stack until they directly contribute to a transaction, providing a more efficient and cost-effective way to manage product catalogs.
Unlike other commerce platforms where licensing costs rise with the number of products managed, Occtoo offers a fixed monthly price, regardless of data volume or product count. This makes it a flexible and cost-effective solution for businesses with large or fluctuating catalogs.
Final Thoughts: The Future of Product Content Management
Managing large product inventories, including inactive or zombie products, doesn’t have to impede performance. With Occtoo, you can separate content from transactions, keeping your commerce engine focused and efficient while still providing rich product data for all items, whether currently active or not.
If your business is handling millions of products, consider how Occtoo can help you simplify your product data management while maintaining a seamless user experience and optimized website performance. It’s time to move beyond the traditional approach of keeping everything in the commerce engine—enhance your system’s capabilities and keep your site running smoothly with Occtoo.
