Cleaning Up Products List And Removing Old Products In Bulk

[laceylou]

Hello! 

I'm new to the community and I'm hoping I can get some help.

My name is Lacey, our store is simplychic.co. We've had a retail location for 3 years now and only just recently launched our website (finally!). We bought the retail store from a previous owner and they had never cleaned up their products and inventory list. So we have products that are years old that we don't sell any more. The nature of our business is that we constantly have new inventory, and sell most items for a couple of months and will never sell them again, so the problem is just racking up and getting worse over time.

I considered exporting the products, sorting them by whether they have an image or not, and removing all that don't have images. But, to make matters more difficult, I have quite a few products that we haven't gotten up on the site yet, but still sell in our physical location using Shopify POS, and they don't have images yet. 

We have over 2,000 products in the system, but only about 600 that we currently sell. I'm hoping theres a standard way something like this is done so I don't have to manual go through all 2,000 products and delete them. I'm sort of OCD and it's really bothering me that our products are so junked up, and makes managing my store just a little bit less enjoyable.

Do you have any advice on how to clean up my products? Is there an app that could help? And is there any way to automate this going forward? I'm thinking along the lines of an app that will delete products if they have no inventory for a set amount of time or something like that. 

Thanks for your time! 

[Karlie · Accepted solution]

Hello, @laceylou!

Karlie here from the Shopify Guru Team! There are a couple of options that you can consider when deleting large quantities of products. Your first option would be to use the Bulk Editor remove products in bulk. 

To use the bulk editor, you would want to select all of the products you want removed by checking off the check mark next to the product in your Shopify Admin> Products page. You do have the option to 'Select All' as well, if you would prefer to manually go through and delete the products from the Bulk Editor Page. If you've selected each product that needs to be removed by checking off the product checkbox on the Product page, then you can simply click on the 'More Actions' button at the top of the page to select, 'Delete Products.' You can use this guide to help you organize and filter through your Products to bulk adjust them. 

If you know that the products you need to be removed have 0 inventory, then you can also create an Automatic Collection which will automatically pull every product with 0 inventory into the Collection. Then, you could hide the Collection or even just use the collection to see which products you would like to delete - then simply use the bulk editor to delete them. This option would only work if you have enabled inventory tracking for all of your products. If you would like to follow this method, then be sure to follow along to our handy guide, here. 

I've also done a little research for you and I can see that the app, Blot, would help you erase out-of-stock inventory from your store. If you would like to look into Blot, you can check it out, here from the Shopify App Store.

I hope this has answered your question. If not, or if you have any further questions please let me know. I will be happy to help!

[lizandhoney]

Help! ALL of my new inventory just disappeared from my Shopify!  Could someone have accidentally hit bulk delete? Is there a way to fix this?

[farid-movsumov]

Hi @Karlie the link of app you provided is broken. I guess app is not available on app store anymore. 

I have built an app which can delete out-of-stock products. It can be used for this purpose. 

App URL: https://apps.shopify.com/bulk-delete-products

[farid-movsumov]

I know this is an old thread, but I will answer for people looking into it coming from Search.

We added the functionality to our app to allow merchants to filter based on the date. So you can easily delete products older than X years with our app.

Watch the full demo for more information. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XdaxRoQyoc

[Portalsandpalms]

Will Shopify automatically create URL redirects or will bulk deleting ruin SEO