Automatically deleting products out of stock for a year

[TackleAddict1]

Any apps out there that I can select a time frame on how long the product can be out of stock before it deletes them?  

So, far apps like Stoclean will delete all out of stock products and I'd like to be able to set a length of time its been out of stock before its deleted. Example only delete product if its been out of stock for one month etc. 

Thanks in advance!

[PageFly-Victor]

Hi @TackleAddict1,

I'm Victor from PageFly Page Builder App, thank you for your question.

I've created a list of the best apps on Shopify to hide out-of-stock products within a time range for you, let's take a quick look:

- Nada: Sort & Hide Sold‑out

- Push Down & Hide Out of Stock

- Out‑of‑Stock Police

These apps are carefully selected based on their functions and their positive rating on Shopify App Store. Hope they are helpful to you.

You can give it a try and let me know if it meets your demand.

Best regards, 

Victor | PageFly

[TackleAddict1]

Thanks for your suggestions.  I might not have a choice but to use one of these but I was really wanting something that actually deleted the product after being out of stock for a certain period of time.  In my industry products change very quickly and a lot of times get discontinued.  In return my out of stock reports are never helpful because they will always include something I dont carry anymore.   Even worse they are sometimes a varient which makes it even more time consuming to find and delete.  I just dont have the time to sort all of it especially with the amount of sku's I have. If anything ever comes up in the future that would automatically delete a product or varient thats been out of stock for 6 months (or any time frame one would like) I would gladly pay for it and I'm sure I'm not alone. Please let me know if you think of any other ways to help! Thank you for taking the time to respond I really appreciate it! 

[PageFly-Victor]

Hi @TackleAddict1,

I understand your request. Unfortunately, I have never heard of any app which helps delete out-of-stock products. Sadly, all is to hide them.

If you have any other concerns, feel free to ask me!

Best regards,

Victor | PageFly Team

[RachelHSS]

FWIW over a year later, since you didn't get a helpful answer and in case anyone else may find this thread looking for the same thing - I use this wonderful app Matrixify to make bulk edits to products. It's extremely flexible and can even be used to automate these types of tasks if you know how. I'm on the lowest of their paid plans (~$10/month) and it saves me SO much time while keeping my product catalog clean. The app works by exporting and importing excel sheets of your products (you can also use it for collections, blog posts, pages, orders & more) which can be filtered by various conditions and scheduled to make them fully automated.  I will say that for automating product deletion, they don't provide instructions in their help center and when I reached out to ask about it (granted this was a couple years ago when I first discovered the app) they said it couldn't be done. But their team was super helpful on various other tasks and even for deleting products, I found a way that works great!

It can be a bit confusing when you first start using the app, so I would recommend familiarizing yourself with it before reading the following detail on how I use it to automate product deletion. You can download a free version (very limited capacity but no time limit) to test it out and you'll find great instructional resources including an introductory video in their help center.

So, the biggest obstacle is figuring out how to (automatically) filter out your products export to only include the products you want. There is one for inventory quantity so that part is easy (you can set quantity to =0 or to <1). There isn't one to filter specifically based on how long the quantity has been 0 (I don't think Shopify even offers this info in its APIs - its past inventory tracking is really quite atrocious). But it does include a filter for date the product was last updated, so unless you tend to make updates to your product listings after they're out of stock, that would probably work. The nice thing too is that this app stores the export files every time it runs, and since you have to first export the products you want to delete, you could always reference that and use it as a backup from which to reimport products if any were ever deleted that you didn't want to be. You could also use other filter options if there is a category, vendor, etc. that you don't want to delete; or, if there are ever specific products that you don't want to ever be deleted, you could use a tag or metafield or something that you manually add to those products and filter them out. I have a simple tag do-not-delete for when I want a product to be retained in my catalog even if it matches criteria that would normally automatically delete it. Whenever I set up a new export file that is going to be used for automation, I first let it run at least a few times and then review the resulting export files to make sure the filter criteria I set up is accurately pulling the products I'm wanting to work with. Once I'm confident, I move on to the import part.

But, settings-wise, the import part is rather straightforward. So just a couple additional notes on the export. When selecting which product fields to include in the export, you don't need much beyond the ID and Command fields for the deletion to work, but be mindful that if you do want to have a backup available of the product listings that will be deleted, it will only contain the information you select in the export settings. THE MOST IMPORTANT PART - in the "customize columns" section, there is a dropdown option on the COMMAND field - you need to switch this from the default option (MERGE) to DELETE. This is what tells the app to delete the products when the file is imported. Finally, there are optional settings when you first create the export to schedule for a specific time and to repeat the export at a set interval (this can be set by minutes, years or anything in between). There is documentation somewhere in the help center about using these settings to automate product updates.

So that's pretty much it. The key is that, unless you want to get into importing the files into an Excel or Google sheet and then manipulating the data there with formulas before it's imported, you must set the command to delete BEFORE EXPORTING. I know it must seem complicated, but if you're only looking to use the app for this purpose and not concerned with understanding how it works overall to potentially use for other processes, it's pretty easy to follow a related tutorial to just do this set up without going through the general intro or other instructions.

[Ablestar_Daniel]

Hello,

I'm not aware of any way within the Shopify admin to delete out of stock products over a year old but it is something you can do with our Ablestar Bulk Product Editor app. Once you have the app installed you just need to search for products with:

• Inventory Quantity < 1
• Date updated older than 365 ago

The click on Edit Products at the top of the page and tell the app that you want to delete the products:

Then click on Delete Products and the app will delete those products for you. 

A few other things to keep in mind:

• The updated date that you're searching for will be changed any time a product's fields or inventory is changed. If you change the product's description after the stock drops to zero it will have a more recent updated date
• You can also set up repeating edits to run this process automatically but we would recommend logging in once a month and doing it manually. Deleting products is one of the few things that you can't undo in our app and it's good to make sure you're not accidentally deleting products you don't want to.

We also have a YouTube video with more details on how to bulk delete products in Shopify:

I hope this helps some, happy to answer any follow up questions. Best,

Daniel