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

[petgrocer]

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!

[petgrocer]

@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]

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]

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]

+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.

[wad11656]

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