Okay, I played around for a few minutes and this is what I came up with... although I don't know if I've done anything that might affect me negatively elsewhere.
My situation is that I own an online clothing store and the way our products were set up originally was that for each product (ie: t-shirt), we created all the colors and sizes as variants. As our color offering grew for each product, we started hitting the variant limit and at a certain point, couldn't add any more colors for the same product, so we archived all the products and created new products, where each product/color would be it's own product. I see it's also better for SEO, so now, black t-shirts is one product, white t-shirts is another, and so on.
Now we have 16 products that are archived and will never be used, however we don't want to delete them because they have sales histories associated with them. It was really annoying seeing them on the inventory page, especially since there is no inventory of them and they are archived.
My workaround was this:
1. First I went to each archived product, edited it by going to "Publishing," clicking on the 3 dots and selecting "Manage sales channels" and then in the pop up, deselect all the sales channels. I realize that if you have thousands of archived products that you don't want to see, this would be very tedious to do. I only had 16 archived products, so no biggie.
2. Then, I went to Inventory, and at the top where is says All and Incoming, I clicked the + to create a view. I called this view "Current Products."
3. Once this view is created, I click on it and at first, it will show you all the products, because there are no filters applied to the view. I clicked on the search and filter button (magnifying glass on the right) and then Add Filter > Sales Channel and from the list that comes up, just selected Online Store and then hit save.
4. Now, when I go to inventory, I just click on Current Products and it hides all my archived products and even if I search a specific product, it won't show me the archived version of that product.
Hope this works for some of you.
And to ask a question - do you think I'm doing myself a disservice by removing those archived products from all sales channels? Is it going to mess anything up in the future, including sales reports or any other analytics?
