One would reasonably assume archiving a product would prevent it from appearing in the ‘products’ page or in searches. Not so.
If you don’t want hundreds of archived products cluttering up your backend, you have to delete them. The entire point of archiving something is to keep it somewhere out of sight until you need to access it. Instead, it essentially behaves the same as a draft. What’s even the point?
People have been asking to be able to hide archived products in the backend for several years now and it seems like such a simple feature to implement. Would make our lives a lot easier
The current archive status doesn’t really function as many merchants would expect. For stores with large catalogs, archived products can still clutter the Products page unless you manually filter them, which makes the archive status feel less useful as an organizational tool.
I know archived products can be filtered out, but I also agree that this feels like an unnecessary extra step for something that could reasonably be the default behavior. It would be much more intuitive if archived products were hidden from the main Products view by default, with the option to access them through a dedicated filter or archive section whenever needed.
That approach would preserve easy access to archived products while keeping the default Products view focused on active day to day inventory. For merchants managing hundreds or thousands of products, it would make the admin much cleaner and product management far more efficient.
If you found my reply helpful, feel free to mark it as the accepted solution so it can help other merchants following this discussion.
The main reason archived products stay visible in the backend is to preserve historical sales data and order analytics, which deleting completely destroys.
However, you don’t need to manually filter them every time. You can solve this permanently in under a minute using a Custom Saved View:
Go to Products and filter by Status: Active.
Click Save as at the top right and name it “Active Products”.
Pin or drag this tab to make it your default view.
Now, every time you open the Products page, it will automatically show only active products without any archived clutter.
If you need any further help, feel free to reach out.
Also, if you find this answer helpful, please mark it as the accepted solution so it can help others in the community facing the same issue.
Thanks!
HI @wulburt
Right now, Archived products are intended to be inactive rather than hidden, so they still appear in the Products admin and search results unless you filter them out.
A dedicated option to hide archived products by default or exclude them from the main product list would make managing large catalogs much easier, especially for stores that regularly retire seasonal or discontinued products but want to keep the data for historical records. That would preserve the purpose of achiving without forcing merchants to choose between a cluttered admin and permanently delting products.
Hello there @wulburt
Agreed that it would be nice to further separate archived products from active stock. Archiving is nice for retaining historical data without losing it, but having those products constantly popping up in the main Products view can make a large catalog difficult to manage.
A handy workaround is to create a saved product view filltered by status so that you can have your daily workflow focus on active products only, while you can access to the archived products when necessary. A native setting to hide the archived products from the default view would make it much cleaner.