Re: Feature request: Archive variant

How can we archive discontinued product variants without deleting their history?

petgrocer
Navigator
310 3 449

Often a manufacturer will discontinue a variant of a particular product. We need to be able to archive that variant (so we can still run reports at the end of the year, or year over year, etc) instead of deleting that variant and all of it's history. 

 

We request the feature that you set the option for variants to be archived (no longer shows to the clients or pulls up on our POS terminal) but still has the purchase and sale history available. This is usually a standard option in POS systems. Thanks!

Replies 11 (11)

petgrocer
Navigator
310 3 449

@Shopify  any news on if this is getting traction? It would so great to see a list of requests and what is or is not getting considered for updating. This is a pretty basic feature request - we need to be able to remove (safely with keeping integrity of data) a variant from the storefront. Thanks.

TheOliveShop
Visitor
1 0 5

Yes, I agree completely with this request. I have variants that change all the time and the website (and POS screens) are getting messier and messier. Yet if I delete the variants I delete sales history and am unable to report accurately. How is it Shopify considers this as not an important issue - it affects the business and the consumer! Come on Shopify, roll out a useful change for once!

petgrocer
Navigator
310 3 449

Bumping this again. It's been over a year. They spent time coding rounded corners and hiding our search bars in our admin, surely they can spend time working on this too?

amyLXC
Visitor
2 0 2

+1 on this feature request! I've worked in e-commerce for many years and consider this to be a very standard behaviour to be able to manage the visibility of each variant independently. 

I work with a number of fashion brands for whom it's essential we can manage this properly and at the moment we have to spend money to develop solutions as workarounds. 

Would love to see this added.

Amy Sillince | Lux Commerce Consultant
lux-commerce.com
wad11656
Shopify Partner
6 0 2

who made the custom code for you? Does it work well? Archiving the variant removes the Variant from all storefronts? Does it just place the Variant in the "Archived" section of the Products tab in Shopify, along with the standardly-archived Products? I might as well reach out to them to make the customization for us too

PaulNewton
Shopify Partner
7721 678 1620

It's typically advanced theme customizations to hide the variant in the online-sales channel.

And or in tandem with shopify-functions to auto-remove such items from checkouts coming from other channels.

Otherwise it's cloning the product , sans the discontinued variants,  and then resolving all the domino effects that come with that like reports , swapping urls, etc

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petgrocer
Navigator
310 3 449

Feature request to shopify devs! Jan 23, 2025 hoping the mods don't delete my reply or the thread (it's getting policed pretty hard lately with disappearing replies and posts).  Our website is littered with out of stock variants or discontinued variants and it is so messy and unprofessional looking. We want to keep our purchase history so we can't delete it. Please help!

critterpet
Visitor
2 0 1

This is so necessary - we're a new pet boutique and I want to have access to easily bring in various sizes of bags of pet food if someone specifically requests a larger bag, but until that happens I don't want to stock all sizes. Archiving a size variant would make this so much easier - otherwise I have to delete the variant and then create it all over again down the road. 

petgrocer
Navigator
310 3 449

If it helps you at all, we have started (with custom order requests) creating a new sku for EVERY SINGLE item. It's messy but better than having your site littered with 'out of stock' variants constantly all over the place. This way you can archive some of those items. You potentially lose sales if it's a line you carry a lot (for example one food with various sizes, if you put one size as it's own separate sku, people won't know it is available if you show a 1 lb bag, 3 lbs bag and 6 lbs bag on variants for one, but you have 12 lbs as it's own sku). Not ideal but might work for you until Shopify spends coding time on this.

critterpet
Visitor
2 0 1

Thanks for the tip. As a fellow pet related business, I was hoping you could give your thoughts on this - I had started to bundle products into variants to make things a bit tidier on our website, adding various flavours of the same food for example. While this makes things easier for me, the feedback from a customer is that when they searched the item title on our page they weren't aware that there were multiple flavours available as the main item showed was just one variant and it wasn't obvious that there were others available had they selected it. Do you think its better to not have items as variants unless they're things like cat litter in various sizes? Or do you have a workaround for more of the options to show when searched?

petgrocer
Navigator
310 3 449

That was a hard one for us too! We played around with it a bit and discovered that the only way to reach people in the way that they search online was to use flavours as one product, and sizes as variants. So for us, if you search Tollden Farms, you'll see we have Tollden Farms - Botanical - Chicken (then on that product page are the sizes available), and we have Tollden Farms - Vegetable - Chicken (on the product page are the sizes that are available). Then we have every single other flavour listed as its own product. Only the sizes were given variants. Even within that, it was problematic as manufacturers changed sizes or discontinued certain sizes. You can ONLY delete a variant, not hide it, so you either 1) leave it showing as out of stock (or pay for an app to hide that) or 2) delete the variant and lose all reporting capabilities on it. Not ideal. However, when we tried doing every single variant as a full product, the site was overwhelming to search for people, so we went back to the variants.

 

Some of the search mechanisms are changing at Shopify as well. We have a product (Betterbones) and you can't find it on our website. No matter what you search (betterbones, better bones, BetterBones, Betterbones) none of them will show you the product. I expect to sell exactly zero online because you can't actually find it. Hard for staff to search it up on the POS, but we have it in the store. There are two products called Better Bones (one is a supplement powder and one is a chew stick) and only the powder shows up. So obviously they are still messing with the search, because these things used to show up. For your customer's sanity, list all your flavours as individual products and leave your variants to just the sizes for things.