Hi, I’m new to Flow but excited for it’s features moving forward. The biggest and most important thing this App can do for my store is to add a “Delete Variant” button. Our store uses a third party to calculate pricing and every time someone adds something to their cart a new variant is created. I’ve been deleting them manually every few days, but it would be great if Flow just did this action for me automatically. I’d be very happy if a developer could code this feature in. Thank you!
Topic summary
Automating removal of unwanted product variants created by a third‑party pricing app, which adds a new variant each time an item is added to cart. The merchant seeks a native Shopify Flow action to delete these variants automatically instead of manual cleanup.
Clarified that the app creates variants on existing products (not new products). Caution noted about Shopify’s default variant behavior and potential 100‑variant limits, implying deletions must be carefully targeted.
Interim options proposed: use Flow to tag affected products and back up data (e.g., to Google Sheets), call the Admin API via Flow’s send-http-request action, or use automation apps like Mechanic (integrates with Flow, flexible pricing).
Most recent update: Shopify Flow now includes a “Delete product variant” action. This should allow direct automation of variant cleanup within Flow without additional apps.
Status: Largely resolved with the new Flow action. Next steps involve configuring appropriate triggers/filters to identify and delete the specific unwanted variants while respecting default variant constraints.
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Yikes, that doesn’t sound like fun. Are the app not able to fix that behavior?
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Is it actually a variant on the product, or a new product with it’s own variant(s).
Generally it should be a new product by these apps to avoid hitting the 100 variant limit.
If a new product is being made you could at least use flow to tag the products aid in bulk finding them.
Currently flow could still be useful for the part of this process, either tagging products, or sending backup data to google-sheets in case of an accidental delete of the wrong variant to restore with an import.
Till such a feature exits there’s the very advanced route of using the send-http-request action to manipulate the api.
Or more sanely there are automation apps like use mechanic that can be scripted to just do the automation
https://tasks.mechanic.dev/?q=delete%20product%20variant
or go from flow to mechanic.
If you need something like that setup then contact me directly by mail for services.
Please always provide context, examples: store url, theme name, post url(s) , or any further detail.
Contact Info in signature.
Would any delete-product-variant action in flow need to actually work off of a higher delete-product action?
Since products get a default variant, a delete-product-variant action creates yet another new default variant as a side-effect; which is not solving the problem of dangling variants.
It’s a new variant that is created on an existing product, no new products are being created.
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Hello! Still no real solution yet, I looked into some 3-party apps but really hoping a developer can just add this to the list. Don’t really want to pay for another app for this one thing.
The current viable solutions are the send-http-request action, or using an app like usemechanic.
usemechanic has a pay what feels good policy so you can negotiate a price form them.
https://learn.mechanic.dev/platform/policies/pricing
There are other automation apps that integrate with flow and have possibly free pricing depending on things like number or workflows or total steps.
Flow now has a “Delete product variant” action