vanishing products

[Dianna3]

I am regularly having groups of products vanish. Like 11 Bowties from mens category or random items in store. I have alot of products and dont go near many for months, once there they just keep selling or not and thats often how I discover they have disappeared. 

whats happening. and no ive not inadvertently deleted them as I thought this at first, and now positively disproved this, its also not a deletion of a collection just bits here and there, very frustrating. any ideas

[Helen]

Hey, @Dianna3. That does sound frustrating! I’m here to help you figure out what’s going on.

In order to know how to go about troubleshooting this, could you please clarify if your products are:

• Vanishing from your storefront only, but remain in your Products list in your admin
• Being removed from their collection(s), or
• Completely deleted from your Products in your admin

In addition to the clarification above, please also let me know:

• Are you dropshipping? Or are you keeping inventory of, and shipping your own products?
• Are you using any third party apps for inventory management?
• Do you see any information pertaining to these products within the Activity section on the right hand side of your admin Home page, as seen in the example below:

I’ll keep an eye out for your reply!

[Dianna3]

Hi

we have no extra apps for this not drop shipping just small online bussiness keeping our own invetory updated an shipping our own product

the whole product is missing in admin, no record, like it was deleted which there not. I could find no records of them in searching admin

I had to completely rebuild the product’s and put it back on line

since jan 2020 it would be around 60 products this has happened to

Regards dianna

[Helen]

Thanks for all the extra info, @Dianna3.

When searching for the missing products in your admin, were you using the search bar? Or did you also manually scroll through your products to see if they were still there? 

I ask because similarly to search engines like Google, Shopify search results can get out of sync, and need to be indexed. When this happens, a product (or order, customer etc) can be found by manually scrolling through their associated lists, but doesn't show when doing a search.  If this is the case, I can re-index your search results for you; Depending on your inventory size, it will take anywhere from 20 min to 48 hours to complete.

Let’s start by looking more closely into this as the issue that you are experiencing. I need to be able to view your account in order to do so, therefore I am sending you an email so that I can authenticate you, and authorize access. Please keep an eye out for it and reply to the email whenever you get a chance. 

Thanks!

[Dianna3]

Thankyou I noticed on admin searching collection , looking for actual product name as well. The bow ties (mens collection) as a whole disappeared. and last week i had to put the Elephant cookie cutter back on site. Then i will go look at the shop itself like a customer to see if its there and confirm its not showing before I have to put it back up.

i Had not mentioned but i’m also constantly rechecking stock as items qtys are not always correct even if I have just added new stock the week before. I always double check my new items in a product list with edits so I can see its all correct.
I am on a satellite and so speeds can vary as we are remote and had been putting all the issues down to this. But i now know of others on govermnent satellite with shopify without these issues.

when you say reindex will this stop the site working ? during that time.
I have a big turnover of SOME products, namley toys and collectable brooches, i delete these when they sell out. I do not want these reappearing and thats hundreds of items. Feeling very nervous about doing something I do not understand fully

Kind regards Dianna

[Helen]

Thanks for the additional information, @Dianna3. 

I completely understand your apprehension. When your search documents are being re-imported into your store (ie. re-indexing), everything is happening in the background and will not affect anything else on your store. It doesn’t retrieve any deleted items, it just syncs up everything that is currently there. 

However, by the sounds of it, this is not the issue since you are also not able to find the missing products by manually navigating to them in your product list. So we won’t be moving forward with this as a troubleshooting step. Once I hear back from you via email, I’ll look more closely into it to determine how we’ll proceed next.

In regards to the inventory of your products also not being correct, how are you adjusting the inventory? Are you using an inventory CSV file? 

As a first step to determining what’s happening with this, I recommend taking a look at your inventory history for recent products you’ve noticed are not adding up correctly, to see if there is an indication of why the inventory is not as expected. More information about this and where to view it is in the Help Doc for View a product’s inventory history. Let me know what you find out!

[Dianna3]

Thankyou Helen 

Im manually adding products and qtys and the bow ties were all readied before early September (fathers day) which is why I noticed they were gone.  I just checked the history on the Quokka pendant as I just saw it was nil stock and I know I adjusted stock not long after it sold out on 10th January.  I added elephant cookie cutter in last week and that shows that only nothing prior.  I dont use CVS whatever that is. 

Regards dianna

[Helen]

Happy to help, @Dianna3! 

I’d love to take a look directly at those products for you so we can gain more insight into what is going on. Therefore, please reply to the email I sent you yesterday with your myshopify.com url so that we can proceed. Thanks!