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Thank you for the details Nathan. I will contact Volusion directly. But to summarize for any other users happening upon this thread:

The answer to your question is that no, we are not planing to change all of our URLs at once. This will be an ongoing need, perhaps maybe 10 URLs per month on a continuing basis. The scenario is that in the past, when we made an engineering change to our products, we did not generally issue a new product code in Volusion. But for tracking, warranty, and UL listing purposes, going forward, we need to begin issuing new product codes when engineering changes occur. So, when we make a form/fit/function change to a product 12345-A, we will need to create a new product 12345-B.

The solution of canonical relationship links is not applicable here, because we are not just talking about SEO. Any visitor who arrives on 12345-A need to be taken to 12345-B. The canonical will help the search engines avoid duplicate indexing, but it is just as important for us to manage the visits of real users (who may arrive from links other than those in search engine results). So, we need a redirect. Volusion does provide a method for this (http://support.volusion.com/article/using-redirects-products-volusion), but this method issues a 302 redirect which is not desirable for SEO purposes.

And Volusion also provides a method for administering 301 redirects, but only when the requested page does not exist.

So, in the reply from Nathan above, he is recommending to physically delete the old product from the database so that the original page does not exist, and set up redirects using the Volusion application, after the deletion has been done.

There are some details to be considered when taking this approach, so we are going to contact Volusion directly to work through those. But I wanted to summarize here to help others who may have a similar need. Nathan, if I've incorrectly summarized, please add-on. Thanks.

We are seeing the following trend in our rankings and traffic after the recent Google algorithm updates (May 2015 quality/phantom, and July 2015 Panda), and I am curious if anyone here has encountered similar and/or has any good ideas on how to react.

Background - we operate in a niche segment, but compete for keywords with large home improvement stores and mass retailers.

In the past, prior to May 2015, we generally ranked higher than the large home improvement stores and mass retailers for our key specific terms in our niche. We believed that it was because we have a very specialized focus and so our store was highly relevant for someone searching in that niche (for example for the name of the product category as a keyword). In general, we ranked #1-3. Along with a few of our competitors in our niche. And then would be the big box home improvement stores in spots 5-10.

The change we saw starting in May is that now all the home improvement stores and also a few large multi-category retailers took over those top 5 spots and bumped all the specialty retailers and the specialty brand manufacturers (like us) down. Our direct competitors in our niche all seem to have been impacted pretty much the same as us.

So, in summary it seems like these latest updates may have favored the more general retailers but with stronger domain authority than the more specific but smaller retailers. Hard to know for sure, but this is the trend we believe we see.

So, that said, what are some good strategies to respond to this situation? We can't really compete on overall domain authority with these huge retailers. And our previously successful strategy of having a very focused niche, with lots of helpful content, videos, instructional guides, etc. no longer seems to be enough.

Has anyone else seen similar results since this past May? Where specialty retail or brand sites lost ground to larger general retailers? And if so, has anyone found any good strategies to gain back their previous rankings, or at least partially?