How can I restore deleted products in Oberlo?

[capurehiyuy]

Hello there,

For some reason, some of my products got deleted in Oberlo, because i set the setting of the variant is no longer available, it will remove the product automatically. Is there a way to restore deleted products in my store? I wasn't able to backup my products by exporting it to a csv. Let me know. 

[Nick · Accepted solution]

Hi @capurehiyuy,

Nick here from Shopify. Good question! 

Once a product has been deleted it is permanently removed from Shopify and can't be restored. Should a product be deleted from your store you would need to add it back to the admin again. 

Shopify has a helpful guide for this going into more detail about it which you can read here. 

Hopefully, this helps and answers your question. If you have any others, don't hesitate to let me know. 

All the best, Nick

[Nick · Accepted solution]

Hi @capurehiyuy,

Nick here from Shopify. Good question! 

Once a product has been deleted it is permanently removed from Shopify and can't be restored. Should a product be deleted from your store you would need to add it back to the admin again. 

Shopify has a helpful guide for this going into more detail about it which you can read here. 

Hopefully, this helps and answers your question. If you have any others, don't hesitate to let me know. 

All the best, Nick

[capurehiyuy]

I see. I just need to retrieve the product description so that I can repost it again. Hopefully there will be a option to restore products in Shopify in the near future. Thanks.

[Nick]

Complete understand where you are coming from. As a store owner, we've all been there. But this feedback is good and we really appreciate it. I'll put this forward to our development as a feature request on your behalf for the future. 🙂

[capurehiyuy]

Thanks Nick! 🙂

[threeworlds]

Yes please add a restore or trash can for deleted products, even 24hours available until deleted. 

[itsewez]

Hi, this comment was from 4 years ago...is it still the same? There is no way to retrieve products when accidentally deleted??

Is there a way to have copies of your site or products in case they are accidentally deleted?

I just tried to remove variations and double checked that only specific product variations were checked and the next thing I know all of the products were deleted...

[thetanks]

Hi Nick, or anybody reading this,

I have a questions about deleted SKUs! I accidentally deleted the original SKUs provided by Oberlo. Are these required for me to move forward, and if so how do I go about ascertaining the original SKUs for the products I have selected.\

Please advise

[Nick]

Hi @thetanks,

Great question. I spoke to the Oberlo support team about this for you. They said that the products are not synced by the SKU and this means that the SKU's can be changed if you like. So you don't need to use the original SKU's provided by Oberlo. 

[Allangirard]

Hello, it happens to me that has their horrible thing, I worked for 6 months on my shop there were 1900 SEO optimized products by hand and the images redone! Unfortunately I made a handling error by wanting to remove the products with a stock at 0 it has removed all the products from my shop I lost everything has been removed I beg you I even had an epileptic seizure I just got out of the hospital and I'm writing this message, but restore me to the previous version of June 12, 2020 I beg you I lost 2000 hours of work 6 months of work because of a click I beg you! I pay more than 100€ with the apps per month I beg you I lost all the work of 6 months !

[Nick]

Hi @Allangirard,

I would love to be able to help you with this, but it's something which isn't possible. Shopify is an as is service as per the Terms and Conditions (Section 7.3) and isn't a backup service nor does Shopify store all the data from stores, so I couldn't even restore the products for you if I wanted to. I wish I could give you better news about this, but it is the same for all the store owners. 

[Frank84]

hi. i unfortunately deleted the variant of may product and the same time the sku code. my question is: how can i undo the sku code?

thank you very much for your help

[Nick]

Hi @Frank84, 

When you say undo the SKU code, do you mean to undo the action and get the SKU code back after deleting the variant? If that is the case, it would be the same as deleting a product where the product or its values (such as the SKU code) cannot be restored. 

[andreamueller]

This is actually a horrible feature! I went in to the Art of Where App and it deleted a bunch of my products! What a terrible way to lose hours of work in seconds with no way of retrieving it.  I pay you guys $80/month. There should be a way to retrieve this kind of thing for that kind of money. I have to say I am very very disappointed. 

[JP_PEI]

If you delete a product, is possible to use an app like Excelify to recreate the product with the original Shopify product id by passing product id as one of the values in an Excel file? Or will Shopify ignore the product id and create a new one instead? Thank you.

[Renars]

Hello @JP_PEI 

Renars here from Excelify.

IDs cannot be set or changed in Shopify and will always be assigned by Shopify automatically when creating an item, so that would not really be possible.

But if you have all other product data in the file, then the product should be re-created with data as you have in the file.

[JP_PEI]

Hi, Renars. I did confirm your statement. I tried it in our test Shopify environment and even after putting in the same product id from the deleted product and using Excelify.io, Shopify created a new one for the product. Thank you for your response. 🙂

[s1m2]

it you can cancel where you are getting the product from then you can add it back to your site if you want to.

[KeatinJP]

There seems to be a known issue with deleting variants that result in an entire line of products being deleted through Shopify.  I had that happen to me this morning.  I deleted several variants and the next thing I know, all of my products and photos are gone.  Is there any way to restore them or am I now going to have to manually re-enter everything??

[juniperbrands]

My client accidentally deleted one of their (most complicated) listings and I frantically contacted support to see if it could be recovered before finding this online article. I had to spend 2-3 hours tonight trying to remember all of the details from that page from scratch and their page was offline for half of the day. For reference, this page is linked in several places on their website (featured on the home page as one of the CTA's), and has 60 variants.

If there was a 24-48 hour recovery period for deleting products, I would have saved 2-3 hours of my time plus the time lost on acquiring clients while the site was down for half a day.

I hope you would consider a similar feature on your future product roadmap. Thank you!

[Nick]

Hi @juniperbrands,

Thank you for your feedback. I think that's a very interesting concept and will add your point and example of how it affected you regarding the delay aspect to the feature request. 

[andreamueller]

I 100% agree. For the cost of your service this should be an option! This is horrible. 

[butterflyersinc]

I think it's ridiculous that Shopify doesn't have a trash bin for deleted products so they can be easily and quickly restored. I had accidently had a product checked that didn't show on the screen and when I deleted the product I wanted to delete, the other one was also deleted accidentally. Not only did I have to relist the product I didn't want to delete, I lost all the 20+ reviews for that product. That really stinks! All because Shopify doesn't have the foresight to realize, sometimes, products get deleted by accident. 

[Nick]

Hi @butterflyersinc,

I completely see how that could be frustrating. I spoke to our higher-level support team about this. They mentioned there is a limited timeframe where some products can potentially be restored, but there are no guarantees. If it's something you'd like to explore more, I can reach out to you directly about it if you would like? If so, could you confirm the best email to reach you on is the one you signed up to the community with please. 

The Rewind app is something you could look into considering, it won't save what's already lost but it will stop this from happening again should it. You can see the Rewind app here. 

Last but not least I will also submit this as a feature request on your behalf. 

[Chrisk1979]

Nick,

I would like someone to reach out to me asap about this if possible. I just deleted 50+ products from my store because I was planning on importing them back from my CSV file. I didn't realize when I deleted them that all my images would be deleted as well. This just happened within the past hour.

[Nick]

Hi @Chrisk1979,

Shopify support doesn't call out or contact store owners directly. Would you be able to reach out to the support team by live chat or phone from the link here please and you can talk to somebody in real-time about the next best possible steps for you here. I just want to let you know though, once a product has been deleted from a store it does remove all aspects of the product including the images, so there is no guarantee of being able to retrieve them back and your best bet might be to include the images in the CSV file you are uploading with the products again. 

Shopify created a YouTube tutorial video going through all the steps on how to import product CSV files which you can see below as well as the guide here.

[andreamueller]

Can you please contact me about this? Seriously this is now going to be at least 6 hours of my time.  

I am considering moving my site just because of this. 

info@wildbella.ca

[Black_Mamba]

I would like to add the following:

It is absolutely not understandable, why it is such easy to delete products. Yesterday, I have deleted one product by accident.

What I intended to do was to cancel one product out of the sales channel Point of Sale (POS). I did not expect that I would delete the product totally, the whole master data for all sales channels. That is without doubt an absurdity, that this is even possible.

Within an ERP system that would not be possible as soon as you have sold the product the first time or if you have assigned the product to a sales channel, a procurement organization or any other entity due to the postings and the document flow. You only can archive products after you have done some pre-work, normally, but you can not easily delete them.

If shopify makes it possible – what should be avoided immediately for the future – then it would make sense to ask in advance: “Are you sure, you would like to delete this product for all sales channels, and in addition you would like to delete the whole master data, without having any chance to restore the product later, instead of just archiving the product?”

The way shopify is offering that “feature”, this is just ridiculous and unprofessional. Fortunately, I could rebuild the product, because I made a copy, which was inactive, some weeks before. Luckily, the reviews appeared as well, what I did not expect, but the history is gone, turnovers and inventory.

Kind regards

[HowlingDog]

Today I was going to delete one product variant, and I accidentally (???) deleted the entire product. I put a ticket in with Shopify support but did not hear back yet. Then I came here and found out that once you delete a product, you can't have it restored. I call this BS. If Shopify really wanted, they could dig in their archives on their servers and retrieve the information for their customers. I am losing sales as I am typing this. I need to go back to recreate the entire product, including the description, pictures, sizing chart, variants, and so on. We are all paying a lot of money to Shopify. A feature like TRASH or something similar would be a logical thing to have available. 

[Gina1682]

HELP!!

Is there a way to restore deleted products? I deleted them in a third party app I installed not realizing it deleted them from my actual store!! 

[Nick]

Hi @Gina1682,

It could be worth reaching out to the app developer directly to find this out for sure. They would be able to help you identify if they are completely gone from your store if you removed them from the app. 

[LDI]

Hi,

If you are lucky you my find your store on https://web.archive.org and recover some of the delete products

You can also try to google "site:yourstore.com" and see if Google have a cache of your products

[Cfruiter]

Hi there - I wanted to delete one variant of a product and it went and deleted the entire product- and now  I want to restore but can't!

[Nick · Accepted solution]

Hi @Cfruiter,

Once a product has been deleted it's not possible to restore it in any way. Shopify has a guide with all the information about adding and deleting products which you can see here. I have also highlighted the part about deleted products below: 

Was it just the one product this happened for? 

[indigoelixirs]

Hi, I also just tried to delete one specific variant and the whole product randomly deleted. Perhaps this is some kind of glitch? This has never happened before in my 3 years on Shopify and I am positive I did not hit the delete button for the entire product. I lost a ton of reviews on my most popular item so I would appreciate if you could look into this! Thanks.

[Nick]

Hi @indigoelixirs,

That does seem very strange for sure. 

Can I ask which product review app you are using? With the Shopify developed product review app, it is possible to get the reviews back and you won't lose them. It does seem unlikely the whole product would have been deleted if one variant was removed. 

Would it be possible for you to check the product review app and getting the reviews back and we can take it from there? 

[savageoi]

same thing has happened to me, i have a multilisting and it has stopped me editing or deleting a single product , this is 2 hours of work gone just cos Shopify have fixed something that wasn't broken

[david_warner123]

Unfortunately, if you didn't back up your products, restoring deleted items in Oberlo might be difficult. A clear return policy is essential to manage customer expectations and provide support if they need to return or refund their purchases. Make sure to communicate your return policy clearly to build trust with your customers.