Redirecting a major ecommerce website

We plan on stopping all operations on our site and redirecting the links to a new ecommerce site that we are creating. So which is the best way to make this redirect happen? These are somethings I have thought of.
1. We could simply carry out a 301 redirect and the internal links to the new site. We could have a message on the landing page explaining why the user has been redirected to this site
2. We could 301 just the internal links to the new site and have an explanation posted.
Would this help? Or is there any other way of doing this?

See original post by diagurzula