Have you ever visit your favorite website only to receive that most annoying page in the world along with the annoying message

"Our website is undergoing maintenance. Please try again later. We apologize for the inconvenience"

Inconvenient indeed! Well none of us can truely avoid shop maintenance because we have to do it, but why impact your customers.

I am in the progress of totally re-merchandising my shop. I will be removing products and sections, in addition to adding new ones. My solution to this is to update my shop homepage and direct customers to the Cafepress Marketplace. The twist is I am linking them to my designs on the Marketplace. In addition, I am providing them the link to my Twitter page and blog for updates.

Let me know what you think.

http://cafepress.com/hexxwear

If your gonna do that, I'd use the Search feature within your shop. Why send customers away to the MP and most likely lose those sales...

I think you just do your rearranging. Any customer on the site during that time will still see where to go, and with the way CP is set up, your current section urls and product urls will stay exactly the same as long as you're just rearranging/moving.

How long to you expect it to take?

It's unfortunately not going to be a quick process for me. I am in the process of re-branding I guess you can say. So most of the products are going to be replaced not just moved. I just purchased a new domain and customers are directed there, to my blog and twitter for updates.