Products in inventory disappearing

[markospets]

We discovered that 300+ products had disappeared from our store (out of 728 products), after exporting from Shopify via CSV file to a delivery company that works alongside us. Over the past 5 months, I have been manually entering every product in my shop, into Shopify to 1) use as my pos in my shop, and 2) connect with my online website. Since then, our total products in shop is now 3300. I am positive there is roughly 700 products missing, even though they were all inputted manually. 

Over the past few months, I have been keeping an eye on the "product total", and based on how many products I was inputting daily, it seemed very low. 

I have just discovered that items have been getting deleted from my shopify the whole time. 

Shopify support suggested we edited the CSV file, and therefore the products were not retained in our shop. Shopify have since clarified that this is not the case. 

I have reached out to Shopify multiple times now, including requesting a callback. Each time, either there is no sound on the other line (after already waiting 4+ minutes on hold listening to a random song), or someone speaks, but cannot hear you at all. Our phone works 100% as we're calling customers all day. 

Has anyone experienced anything similar? Products that you have inputted manually, disappearing from your store? 

Best regards, 

Markospets

[TenThousandPots]

I have been having the same issue, but have had very little luck in finding anyone else who has experienced this. Have you found a way to keep products from disappearing?

I enter all of our products by hand - so it is very frustrating when they vanish without a trace. 

I chatted with a Shopify representative over the computer, but was unable to resolve the issue.

[markospets]

We never got to the bottom of it.. check if they're in draft products
instead of active. We found a few of the "missing" in there.

It also may be due to importing/exporting products. From what I understand,
if you edit the excel file and it is not in the exact format shopify wants,
some products will not be imported.

My only advice is check the drafts. Also, if at any point you did export
files, check if they're still in the system by product. You may be able to
pinpoint exactly when products began disappearing and look into it
accordingly.

I hope this helps you out in someway.

[BonnieJ]

We have run into this same issue. At first, I thought Shopify was deleting products when they reached "out of stock" status but have since realized it is just randomly deleting products. It is very frustrating and I have not received any resolution from Shopify. 

[markospets]

We never got to the bottom of it, the only thing you can do is monitor how
many products are in your store with this url:
https://admin.shopify.com/store/*YOURSTORENAME*/products/count.json?

Just change the bold part to your store name and paste the link into your
browser, it will automatically pop up how many products you have.

Check morning and night to see if products are getting deleted, also check
in the draft/inactive products as we found some in there too.

[Kodell]

Our store has also been experiencing this issue.  As a small business that has to input all products manually (no imports), this is incredibly frustrating!  Items come to the till that we have been scanning through for years and all of a sudden they're gone and need to be re-input and counted.  Aggravating! 

I used to like Shopify quite a lot, but this past year has been nothing but issues on top of issues on top of terrible app UI changes that make things clunky, unintuitive, and inefficient.  We no longer see a point in paying such a premium price for a product that seems to have done nothing but degrade over time instead of improve or even at the bare minimum stay the same.  We can't even get answers or solutions to issues like this.