How to stop Shopify showing Archived products?

Shopify Discussion
1

Hi There,

We have a number of archived products that will be coming back in future but in the meantime, we don’t want these products cogging up the product screens in Shopify admin, Shopify apps and third-party apps.

But because all product views across Shopify and apps default to ‘All’ it means these archived products clog everything up anyway which is kind of pointless - right?

Is there a way to set ‘All’ so that ‘Archived’ products don’t show - or is there another way around this?

Remember, any solution also needs to apply to apps - we’ve even tried naming archived products with a ‘z’ in front, to try to push them to the end but apps don’t seem to display products using name order.

Any help would be much appreciated. Cheers, Ben

2

Hi @Ben31

Thank you for sharing your question here, I can definitely understand having a large catalogue and wanting to be able to easily filter out your unavailable products from view.

At this time Shopify does not offer the ability to save views as a default view in the products or orders list in the admin. I can’t speak for apps though, as I believe that is something they might be able to implement.

I have shared this feedback with our developers and hopefully this is something we can implement soon!

3

Thanks Shay

4

Shay, can you please push this request to engineering? What is the point of “archived” if it doesn’t exclude items from common views?

It’s extremely frustrating to constantly be shown products that have been archived. This happens not only in the frequently visited admin products view, but also slows us down when using any app that pulls products, showing a list of ALL products in the shop instead of just non-archived products.

Considering the frequency with which Shopify users build / edit product related portions (aka everything) of their site, this oversight is wasting millions (billions?) of hours of peoples time.

Other forum posts / complaints also recognize this:

https://community.shopify.com/post/1096312
https://community.shopify.com/post/2401504

5

Couldn’t agree more. This situation must be almost impossible to deal with in some Stores.

6

I have been wondering this forever. IT’S SO FRUSTRATING. After all this time, still nothing. I feel like this is a basic, common sense feature to have - yet we get all these other more intricate and complicated updates. I’m so tired of seeing Archived products all over the place - ESPECIALLY getting CONSTANT notifcations and “error” messages from other platforms like Meta.

7

Still a daily frustration sorry, hopefully something is being done? Cheers

8

How is this not implemented already? Shopify has so many amazing features and can’t get the most basic stuff like this integrated.

9

Staff don’t earn their primary living from a Shopify store, so are looking from the outside.

They need a ‘We understand what it’s like earning a living on our platform’ product cycle that focuses on quality-of-life; all the little clicks/taps/loads to accomplish basic daily tasks. In fact, probably two cycles: one to undo recent improvements like analytics, and a another to add basics like a financial year - and have it appear first anywhere a date range is set.

Our financial year is where our tax exposure lives (in NZ it’s April-March) so it’s not a ‘nice to have’. And now that we’re in January, it takes a total of 21 taps plus a scroll (to see the ‘Apply’ button) just to set the financial year to date. Crazy - no?

Then for every additional month, that’s an extra tap. And as we get closer to March, we’re checking the financial year more and more. So when switching between day and month, that’s an extra 21+ taps, many times a day.

As basics aren’t recognised and boring but useful stuff gets removed, the platform feels more and more like molasses - not to mention the app soup we all use to try and solve problems.

It’s an increasingly horrible feeling when trying to use Shopify to pay your mortgage, and Shopify has told us we’re one of the successful stores.

10

Going on 18 months since this issue has been brought up and no progress has been made.

What is the point of archived products showing on everything from product lists to inventory to Stocky?

Right now ALL archiving a product does is remove it from being visible to buyers. The exact same thing is accomplished by changing the sales channels.

What archiving SHOULD do is remove the product from all views/processes except when we search specifically for archived products. Deleting a product is not a viable solution since we then lose all historical information for the product.

It is like the Shopify developers never actually had to work with the back end of retail selling and inventory. Maybe they should go work in a shopify brick and mortar business for 3 months and then they’ll understand the frustration and annoyance we all feel at things like this.

11

I found a workaround. filter out all archived items in your inventory under the products tab. Then create a tag called archived and apply them to all your archived items. Then create a new filter using the search box to specify “not archived”. This will filter out all items that are tagged “archived”. You can save this view and create additional filters and views for your use. This won’t change the “all products” default view, but you can remember to use the custom views each time to get to your unarchived list.

12

Thanks @joefrombiotouch, OP here. The real frustration is with apps that interact with products (GWP, cart upsells, etc) where you’re forced to sift through all your archived products - and depending on the app, all the archived variants as well!

To anyone at Shopify, ‘Archived’ creates an expectation that isn’t being met and it’s coming up on 3 years since this request was made.

13

Hi @Ben31 :waving_hand:

display products using name order

Either they just bring em in the sequence returned by the API, default is ID, which generally means the order products were created* in as shopify assigned each product ID.
If your lucky maybe they use one of the sort keys like product_type or vendor or have a setting for it, in which case your prefix trick might work there. Otherwise more extreme kludge* may be possible for those that really needed by deleting and recreating archived products around the clock.

There’s also trying the new unlisted status.
It’s not perfect but some apps may respect that new status rather than auto consuming it.
Unlike archived status ,which lets be real , seems like most apps are built to just ignore the archived status as any type of constraint.
https://changelog.shopify.com/posts/new-unlisted-product-status-1
But that comes with the new issue of such products being on the storefront so they’d need thier template with stuff like qty, buy buttons, etc removed.

*kludge if app ingest is by ID that can mean the last products/variants made goes to then end.
So if you can delete and recreate that may be one path of control test on singular products. Not good though if you need order connections beyond skus, recreating products AND also editing orders to repeal and replace IDS in orders themselves might be possible for some cases but that can be a lot of api calls.

Reference data using metaobjects

A hard alternative can be ,if you don’t need things like the order history connecting to those products, to just setup some scheme to convert the products into some sort of metaobject representation.
Limited use case really , such as the only reason to keep products around instead of deleting them is to have a backend text reference. if having a backend text reference is

Custom IDs

:technologist: Now a days there is also the custom-ID process but that still isn’t a first class citizen in the api as it’s relgated to the productByIdentifier query, and not a guard merchants can force in the products query.
Which may be a path merchants should file feature requests around with a shopify advisor on the help site https://help.shopify.com DIRECTLY (shopify-staff dont come round here much anymore) , or devs push for on the dev forum https://community.shopify.dev .

What to do in the here and now

It could be decades for a platform level change, or never.
So for apps there’s also making a form letter and firing it off to each app telling them to provide some way to filter products out. If not by archive status then by collection or tag, etc.
They need to be respecting the status parameter in the api to filter for only active or draft products as default or through options.
https://shopify.dev/docs/api/admin-graphql/latest/queries/products#argument-query-filter-status

For a better admin search now rather than later that moves into the area of making custom dashboards instead of living with the bare minimum feature set from a SASS.

14

@PaulNewton Thank you but it’s the wrong solution(s) to the wrong audience sorry.