How should I handle out of stock or discontinued products in inventory management?

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

Handling products that are temporarily out of stock or discontinued when using daily CSV imports from a legacy POS (point-of-sale) and a supplemental database. The generated CSV contains only currently sellable items, excluding previously imported, now-unavailable products.

Key challenge: Identifying items missing from the current CSV and efficiently processing them without manual, time-consuming filtering. Considering creating a separate CSV of out-of-stock items, but uncertain about automating archiving or deletion via the import workflow.

Open questions:

  • Whether to archive or delete products that are no longer in stock.
  • If an item returns to stock later, whether importing it will automatically unarchive and reactivate the original product or create a new product, leaving the old version archived.

No decisions or automation approach confirmed yet; seeking best practices and clarification on import behavior. Discussion remains open with unresolved implementation details.

Summarized with AI on March 4. AI used: gpt-5.
1

I am helping develop a store that will eventually have thousands of products. I am using CSV imports to add products and update inventory, and was hoping to get some advice on how to best deal with products that are no longer available or have temporarily have gone out of stock.

I am provided a daily CSV file exported from their legacy POS system that I then match up with another database to create a CSV file that includes in-depth descriptions and images, etc.

The result is a CSV file of all current items they want to sell. It doe NOT include any of the previously imported items that are no longer in stock.

So, my next step is to figure out how to best deal with any item that is NOT in the current list.

I can filter the older items using the search filters to deal with them, but that is time consuming.

I can create a CSV of items that are no longer in stock, but not sure if I can “automate” archiving or deleting them through the import process.

That leads me to my questions…

  1. Should I archive or delete the older products that are no longer in stock?

  2. If the item comes back in stock, will an import of the product “unarchive” it and put it back in the store as active, or would it create a new product and leave the old “version” of the product archived?

Any advice would be most appreciated!