How to stop Shopify showing Archived products?

[Ben31]

Hi There,

We have a number of archived products that will be coming back in future but in the meantime, we don't want these products cogging up the product screens in Shopify admin, Shopify apps and third-party apps.

But because all product views across Shopify and apps default to 'All' it means these archived products clog everything up anyway which is kind of pointless - right?

Is there a way to set 'All' so that 'Archived' products don't show - or is there another way around this?

Remember, any solution also needs to apply to apps - we've even tried naming archived products with a 'z' in front, to try to push them to the end but apps don't seem to display products using name order.

Any help would be much appreciated. Cheers, Ben

[Shay]

Hi @Ben31 

Thank you for sharing your question here, I can definitely understand having a large catalogue and wanting to be able to easily filter out your unavailable products from view. 

At this time Shopify does not offer the ability to save views as a default view in the products or orders list in the admin. I can't speak for apps though, as I believe that is something they might be able to implement. 

I have shared this feedback with our developers and hopefully this is something we can implement soon! 

[Ben31]

Thanks Shay

[Wunderlink]

Shay, can you please push this request to engineering? What is the point of "archived" if it doesn't exclude items from common views?

It's extremely frustrating to constantly be shown products that have been archived. This happens not only in the frequently visited admin products view, but also slows us down when using any app that pulls products, showing a list of ALL products in the shop instead of just non-archived products.

Considering the frequency with which Shopify users build / edit product related portions (aka everything) of their site, this oversight is wasting millions (billions?) of hours of peoples time. 

Other forum posts / complaints also recognize this:

https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-apps/feature-request-archived-products-should-be-hidden-by-d...
https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/have-a-default-view-in-the-admin-product-list-pa...

[bauersbrew]

I have been wondering this forever. IT'S SO FRUSTRATING. After all this time, still nothing. I feel like this is a basic, common sense feature to have - yet we get all these other more intricate and complicated updates. I'm so tired of seeing Archived products all over the place - ESPECIALLY getting CONSTANT notifcations and "error" messages from other platforms like Meta. 

[Ben31]

Still a daily frustration sorry, hopefully something is being done? Cheers

[Woolyn]

Going on 18 months since this issue has been brought up and no progress has been made. 

What is the point of archived products showing on everything from product lists to inventory to Stocky?  

Right now ALL archiving a product does is remove it from being visible to buyers.  The exact same thing is accomplished by changing the sales channels.  

What archiving SHOULD do is remove the product from all views/processes except when we search specifically for archived products.  Deleting a product is not a viable solution since we then lose all historical information for the product.  

It is like the Shopify developers never actually had to work with the back end of retail selling and inventory.  Maybe they should go work in a shopify brick and mortar business for 3 months and then they'll understand the frustration and annoyance we all feel at things like this.  

[jon1999]

Couldn't agree more.  This situation must be almost impossible to deal with in some Stores.

[antron]

How is this not implemented already? Shopify has so many amazing features and can’t get the most basic stuff like this integrated. 

[Ben31]

Staff don't earn their primary living from a Shopify store, so are looking from the outside.

They need a 'We understand what it's like earning a living on our platform' product cycle that focuses on quality-of-life; all the little clicks/taps/loads to accomplish basic daily tasks. In fact, probably two cycles: one to undo recent improvements like analytics, and a another to add basics like a financial year - and have it appear first anywhere a date range is set.

Our financial year is where our tax exposure lives (in NZ it's April-March) so it's not a 'nice to have'. And now that we're in January, it takes a total of 21 taps plus a scroll (to see the 'Apply' button) just to set the financial year to date. Crazy - no?

Then for every additional month, that's an extra tap. And as we get closer to March, we're checking the financial year more and more. So when switching between day and month, that's an extra 21+ taps, many times a day.

As basics aren't recognised and boring but useful stuff gets removed, the platform feels more and more like molasses - not to mention the app soup we all use to try and solve problems.

It's an increasingly horrible feeling when trying to use Shopify to pay your mortgage, and Shopify has told us we're one of the successful stores.