Obsolete Products

Overview

As the number of SKUs grows every year, and as the old SKUs need to be updated to maintain the database consistency, the size of daily download.zip files grows accordingly as well.

To reduce the size of the catalogs, we offer an option that removes completely obsolete and outdated products from customer full market PUSH or Category Base catalogs.

The algorithm to determine obsolete products is conservative. It does not remove discontinued products that might still be in the channel and takes into consideration SKU lifecycle differences in various categories, as well as the last SKU request date by 1WS DataSource customers.

Criteria

The products are defined as obsolete based on the following criteria.

Discontinued by Manufacturer

The products are marked as discontinued when this information either can be found on the manufacturer’s website or is provided by the manufacturer in their feed to 1WS.

Category Lifecycle

The lifecycle of a product varies based on a category it belongs to. We defined a lifecycle value for every product category and then doubled it to make sure to keep the products that remain active on the market longer than the average lifecycle.

The products that are older than doubled category specific lifecycle value were marked as obsolete.

Obsolete Technology

The products that have an outdated or no longer used technology or hardware are marked as obsolete.

However there are some exceptions.

Examples

1. Notebooks, netbooks, tablets, personal computers and workstations with DDR2 SDRAM, DDR SDRAM, SDRAM, LPDDR2 SDRAM memory technology and Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows Vista, Windows XP, DOS as operating system are discontinued.

Exceptions: Clusters, kiosks, media centers, PC barebones, point of sale terminals, servers, system upgrades, terminal stations and thin clients.

2. DRAM, SDRAM, DDR2 SDRAM, DDR SDRAM, EDO RAM, FPM RAM, RDRAM (RAMBUS) smaller than 1GB are obsolete.

3. Hard drives with the capacity smaller than 250 GB are discontinued.

Exceptions: Solid state drives, solid state / hard drives, hybrid hard drives.

Database Structure

The information on what products are obsolete and what are active is provided in the table cds_Catalog.txt in the column “Reserved4”. The obsolete products have the value “1” in this field.

The obsolete products may also be looked up in the Extranet in the “Catalog availability” or in the “Search your SKUs” sections.

There is a drop down menu “SKU Activity” on the right side of the page. Choose “Obsolete” to get the list of the obsolete products.