Another possibility is to duplicate: show an Amazon listing, and also set up an eBay module titled "Find such-and-such on eBay" with a subtitle "in case it's not available on Amazon any longer."

The trade-off you need to consider is that Squidoo works by the power of recommendation, and people are more likely to buy something with a personal recommendation that appears to be a genuine editorial about a specific product. They can do an Amazon search for themselves. They know those search results are automatically generated. What they want, and can't necessarily get from Amazon listings, is confirmation that somebody else thinks a product is worth the price. For that reason, whenever possible, I'd run the risk of a broken link down the road.

For the Amazon spotlight module, you can go to settings and turn on the "used" price. If it's something old or out of date, I may include in my description that it's still available through third party sellers on Amazon. For example, see this listing of an old 1960s humor book I just added to one of my lenses. It's out of print. I actually had to find and ADD a picture of the book to my Amazon Spotlight Module manually, since Amazon doesn't have a picture of the book. In that way, I've made the module as evergreen as possible.

Another way to look at the deadlinks issue: we need to keep republishing lenses every month or so, to help retard lensrank decay. Newly-published lenses get a "freshness boost". One quick way to edit/update a lens is to scan it and check for out-of-date product listings. Planned obsolescence is, unfortunately, a profitable business model, and has been for decades!

One problem that I have with commercial modules is that with a year or so the product usually goes out of date and then there are dead links. As an example, all of your Cafepress links on your funny sign lens are currently dead.

If you have alot of lenses it is difficult to make sure that all of the links are always active. My only suggestion is when you use Amazon modules do not to use Amazon spotlight or make the selection yourself. Instead, I prefer to let Amazon choose. That way there are never deadlinks. Do you have any suggestions on how to avoid deadlinks in commercial modules?

EuroSquid/Gene