Re: Feature Request: Archived products should be hidden by default

Feature Request: Archived products should be hidden by default

Noah_D
Explorer
44 1 91

Hi,

We're just switched to Shopify POS from Lightspeed Onsite POS and are getting used to all the back end changes that requires. One of the things that's different is product management and we're happy to have the new 'Archived' status. Since we've switched we've started to use the Archived status for older products that we will (probably) never stock again. The popup that appears when you do this is:

Archiving products will hide them from your sales channels and Shopify admin. You’ll find them using the status filter in your product list.

But the archived products are only filtered out if the search is for 'Active' products. Isn't the point of Archiving products that you don't want to see them and that they should be hidden from the 'All' search by default? At least that was how it worked in our old POS.   I know that the products are hidden from the sales channels but they should also be hidden from the Shopify admin unless I'm specifically looking for them. If anyone else is using the Archived product setting and doesn't think it should work this way (or likes the way it works right now) please reply and let me know. I'd love to hear how others are using the feature. Noah

Replies 34 (34)

Noah_D
Explorer
44 1 91
Click to expand...
I also want to mention that archived products are shown in the product count of collections when you create a collection tile. They should be hidden here as well.

evolutionlures
Shopify Partner
21 0 70

I agree completely. We have a lot of products which are archived but we don't want to remove them. Currently the main list shows everything. It should either default to "Active" or at least remember which list I have it filtered by even when returning to the site. Having to click the filter "Active" every single time you click on the product list is annoying. What is the point of archiving items if they're still showing in the main list? The way it is now, it's exactly the same as if I just removed all sales channels.

Lsdigi
Visitor
2 0 14

100%. I don’t want to delete the products but I’m tired of the archived products showing in my “products out of stock” section. They should be totally hidden unless you search for them!

 

@Shopify please can you fix this or add a setting to hide products from all pages?

Flightmasterone
Tourist
3 0 12

I 100% Agree. We have 10K products and we almost NEVER want to see archived product in our lists. Please make this a default option, Shopify!

 

TorwoodGC
Excursionist
29 0 17

Oh yes, please.

I came here looking for exactly this feature.

Shopify, please make this happen.

JM76
Visitor
2 0 4

Yes we would like this feature too! 

Noah_D
Explorer
44 1 91

I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one who wants Archived products to be hidden by default. Thank you everyone for confirming that my expectations are pretty normal.

 

I also realized that Shopify has hidden the search field in the Products admin  (and added clicks to our work flow) but they still won't hide our archived products by default. 

 

At least they're consistent in their UX philosophy. Add as many clicks as possible.

TorwoodGC
Excursionist
29 0 17

I feel your pain. 

If only it were possible for Shopify to 'remember' the settings we like.

It's not impossible, just not something that the dev's see a need for.

I've worked closely with a couple of EPOS providers over the past decade and I always say to them "if you want to know if your software is working you need to ask someone who uses it all day every day." These folks can come up with some great ideas, however, they have got to be usable.

EdLazor
Excursionist
21 0 7

Is this addressed by excluding products with 0 inventory in collections?

TorwoodGC
Excursionist
29 0 17

Yes, that is one way, of many.

However, that is an additional step every time you run a filter or search.

Simply NEVER showing items that I don't want to see (because I've archived them) would be a much better scenario

 

EdLazor
Excursionist
21 0 7

Agreed - I also find it annoying to set the view/search criteria and then have to set it again after I look at a product and use the back link on the product view....

kallenconsult
Shopify Partner
65 1 21

You realize, of course, that this would make it so a valid product that had reached 0 available would then NOT show up.

EdLazor
Excursionist
21 0 7

Yes, of course.  It's not an ideal solution, but you're welcome to offer a better solution 🙂

jkmdf
Excursionist
22 0 19

Adding to this—please fix the archived product feature!

  • Archived products should not show under inventory tab

This is such a huge gripe and makes it harder to manage inventory.

LittleHomestead
Tourist
3 0 6

PLEASE make this happen @Shopify !!! All of us shop owners are so tired of seeing our *archived* products show up on our admin page! This has been requested over & over for so long now, and we shouldn't have to click extra buttons just to hide them, when we're working on our active/draft products!

GoddessCharms
Visitor
1 0 2

Yes @Shopify when will this feature be activated.  We keep requesting it.  We do not want archived products to show up in our admin page

 

houseofblanks
Tourist
6 0 5

Bumping this one up.  I can't understand why Shopify thinks anyone would want to see archived products.  At least give us a check box to show/hide them.  

TorwoodGC
Excursionist
29 0 17

It is over two years since the original post.

I'm not going to hold my breath, waiting on this to happen.

 

EdLazor
Excursionist
21 0 7
I found a solution. There are a few add-on apps that will hide these
products. Check out Ultimate Collection Manager or OT Collection Sort &
Manage.
houseofblanks
Tourist
6 0 5

These are not free.  We shouldn't have to pay to make something work the way it should.  We're already paying! 😣

houseofblanks
Tourist
6 0 5

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?

jkmdf
Excursionist
22 0 19

This is still too much unnecessary work.

 

I think everyone should stop posting work arounds. Shopify needs to fix this, it's such a huge inconvenience to have Archived Products be so useless.

 

Did you know that they show archived products under your ABC product analysis too? What point is there in doing that when I'm trying to restructure my products?

 

SHOPIFY: FIX THIS

houseofblanks
Tourist
6 0 5

@jkmdf wrote:

 

I think everyone should stop posting work arounds.


Doing the above is not going magically make Shopify fix this, so in the meantime, all we have are workarounds and yes, they should be posted, to support everyone while we wait. 

jkmdf
Excursionist
22 0 19

And writing out 20 step workarounds that other people might waste their time with instead of complaining isn't going to make them fix it at all. If they don't see demand for it, they won't do shit.

houseofblanks
Tourist
6 0 5

1. Learn how to count.  4 steps != 20 steps.  

2. The workarounds are bringing more value than you are right now, so until you've managed to convince Shopify, you can keep your thoughts to yourself and we will post workarounds if we want to.  You're free to ignore them. 

 

jkmdf
Excursionist
22 0 19

You wrote 4 steps with multiple steps within each step that works out to at least 12 steps. But whatever, my point still stands.  For people with 100+ archived products, we need a proper solution that doesn't require multiple steps to achieve this.

TorwoodGC
Excursionist
29 0 17

It seems that we have a solution.

I spotted a new button and couldn't find any info so I asked the question.

 

https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/what-does-the-quot-create-view-quot-button-do/m-...

 

 

I have just created a Non Archived view in Products. 

It's not perfect, however, one click is better than any other option I have seen.

 

houseofblanks
Tourist
6 0 5

That's what the workaround I posted earlier is!  

 

 

aedi
Shopify Partner
1 0 0

Did anyone find a solution to this?

Noah_D
Explorer
44 1 91
Yes. I think that I would.

Pburt16
Excursionist
19 0 18

Also worth noting that archived (deactivated) products also show up in ANY app that imports products such as bundling apps, multi platform inventory mgmt apps, wholesale apps, and download apps. Suddenly, they're live products again.

It's a massive pain in the ass ... Such a basic feature ... you can rest assured it will NEVER be corrected by Shopify.

EdLazor
Excursionist
21 0 7

Pburt16, that's a problem with the systems that are importing the data or the tools you're using for the data migration, not a responsibility of Shopify. Export the data using Matrixify, massage it, and then import what you want.

Migrating data from one platform to a variety of other platforms is not a basic feature. At a minimum, you have to qualify which data will be migrated, you have to map fields between systems, and you have to address business logic like item state.

I realize you're trying to emphasize the need for the original request, but conflating or dramatizing the problem makes it more difficult to solve and less likely that we will ever get any help.

 

We don't want archived products to show up by default in the admin interface. Or put differently, we want archived products to be handled just like archived orders.

Pburt16
Excursionist
19 0 18

I'm not talking about migrating data from one platform to another. I'm talking about how Apps from the Shopify App Store interact with data from active Shopify stores.

I appreciate the lecture, but it's not an unrelated issue and, no, it's not that difficult from programming perspective to prevent a specific data table from being read/imported by an app. In fact, it's easy. Given that Shopify relies exclusively on 3rd party apps to provide basic functionality (for an expensive system that provides very little of value out of the box for all their pedestrian tiers), Shopify should be far more cognizant for how Shopify web hooks impact app development. 

In terms of UX and inventory management, the fact that archived products to show up by default in the admin interface is lousy—That much we can agree on.

 

There are innumerable, simple platform upgrades that have languished in these forums for over a decade that have never been addressed by Shopify. Pointing out how one UX/products management issue cascades into otherUX/products management issues doesn't make it any more or less likely that our voices will be heard. A simple tour of these forums makes that reality crystal clear.

EdLazor
Excursionist
21 0 7

Easy answer, third-party apps can query products by status of active, archived, or draft (https://shopify.dev/docs/api/admin-rest/2024-04/resources/product).

 

You're welcome to your opinion, of course, but I think Shopify is feature rich, fairly extensible, and well designed. Over 4.4 million e-commerce sites use it, and there are over 8,000 apps in the Shopify App Store. 

 

Maybe it's time for you to consider using another e-commerce platform that would more effectively meet your needs.

 

In the meanwhile, if you want to request changes that get implemented, keep them simple and drama free.  They are much easier to understand and quicker to implement. For example, you said it would easy for the admin interface to only show active products by default. Focus on that. Calling the admin interface "lousy" is emotional, subjective, ambiguous, and immeasurable. It makes for a poor product functional requirement, and therefore it's very unlikely to get addressed.