Okay so I have searched and seen several people requesting about removing old Product Types from the menus within the shopify admin. I am not at all having this issue, but I am having a very hard to resolve issue that is closely related to this issue.
My store collection pages are set up with drop down menus for filtering the products within the selected collection base upon Product Types instead of the normal Product Tags.
To better understand here is a URL to one of my Collection pages "Cadillac CTS-V "V2" - Aesthetics" which has not been filtered yet: https://streetdrivenperformance.net/collections/cadillac-cts-v-v2-aesthetics as you can see the URL is as it should be for a collection page ending with /collections/cadillac-cts-v-v2-aesthetics
Now if you go to that URL and select the drop down menu "Filter by Product Type" and select "Engine Cover" it will filter all items from this collection to only show the ones that have this specific product type. It does this by selecting the appropriate Collection URL and adding the Product Type to the end. Here is the URL for that example: https://streetdrivenperformance.net/collections/cadillac-cts-v-v2-aesthetics/engine-cover as you can see the URL ends with /collections/cadillac-cts-v-v2-aesthetics/engine-cover as this is what the product type is set to be, so shopify automatically creates this URL to show these specific items only.
So the reason that I showed you this was to help you better understand how my website is setup, and that it actually works as intended.
Now what I find happening, which is very weird, is that if I change a particular products Product Type, the new Product Type will show up inside of my Filter Menu, and it will use what should be the appropriate URL, but it will not show any of the products that have that new Product Type like it should.
An example of this would be if you go back to the main collection link above, and then open the drop down menu "Filter by Product Type" and select "Front Splitter / Lip", you will find that no items show up, even though there is at least one product with this specific Product Type... Because if there wasn't any products that contained this Product Type, then it would not have automatically populated that as an option into the drop down menu on the collection page.
The original Product Type for these items was simply "Splitter", with some items having the Product Type set to "splitter" with a lower case "S", and neither of these options looked very pleasing within my drop down menus, and I wanted it to be a little more presentable across my entire website. Therefore I updated all items with the Product Type's "Splitter" & "splitter" to now be "Front Splitter / Lip".
Now after making this change it seemed as though the appropriate shopify events had actually taken place. The Product Types "Splitter" & "splitter" have both been removed from my products sorting menus within the shopify admin portal, as well as no longer being a selectable option when adding a Product Type to a new or old product, as well as no long being available throughout my collection page drop down menus seen across my website. With my new Product Type "Front Splitter / Lip" now showing up in their places. The problem that I am having is that even though those old Product Types no longer exist anywhere, the new the Product Type URL's are not working as they should be, as for some reason these Products are still using the old Product Type URL's....
Example: here is the URL for the new Product Type "Front Splitter / Lip": https://streetdrivenperformance.net/collections/cadillac-cts-v-v2-aesthetics/front-splitter-lip
If you click on that link there will be no items that show up, even though there is an item with that specific Product Type which should have this specific URL.
Now the original Product Type "Splitter" can no longer be found within the Filtering drop down menu within the collection page links above, but it can simply be entered into the URL by replacing /front-splitter-lip with /splitter https://streetdrivenperformance.net/collections/cadillac-cts-v-v2-aesthetics/splitter and boom somehow the product which no longer has the Product Type "Splitter" and should not show up under this URL can be found still somehow attached to this original Product Type's URL which should have updated to the new Product Type URL....
See this URL: https://streetdrivenperformance.net/collections/cadillac-cts-v-v2-aesthetics/splitter
I have tried several different methods of fixing this problem, but I have no idea what's going on with these URL's as there is no direct way to view and/or edit the /Collection/Product-Type-URL's.
- I have deleted the product types from all products using "Splitter", "splitter" or "Front Splitter / Lip" and tried keeping them blank, which still kept them within the /splitter URL
- I have attempted to duplicate items and change their Product Type prior to marking the product active and saving the new duplicated product, which still kept them within the /splitter URL
- I have downloaded the CSV file containing all of these particular products and changed the Product Type within the CSV and then imported them back in updating the products to remove their prior Product Types and replace with the new Product Type, which still kept them within the /splitter URL
- I have even created brand new products that have never had the old Product Type before and it still wont add these new products to the new Product Type URL, but in this case it wont even add those items to the old /splitter URL either.
I'm truly at a loss here and its very frustrating because for some of the Product Types that I have changed I can't even remember what their original Product Type was to even be able to try to at least change them back so that the filter menu works at least until I can figure out why these URL's are not updating as they should be.
Please, any help with this would be greatly appreciated!
-Donald
