Can not delete my products. All Products - Actions - Delete selected products

CiprianX
Shopify Partner
2 0 1

Hello to all,

 

I am trying to delete my products, all at once (over 1500 products) and it does not work.

 

It shows that it starts to delete the products, then shows that products are deleted in the background and after 5 minutes no product is deleted.

 

Can you help?

 

Thank you,

Ciprian

Replies 32 (32)

Nick
Shopify Staff (Retired)
4531 434 1024

Hi @CiprianX,

Nick here from Shopify. 

Thanks for reaching out about this, it can be a little awkward at times. For example, if you are bulk selecting all of the products and then changing page it might not work properly. Often you would need to do this aspect page by page which is not ideal. There is however a workaround you could look into. 

The workaround would involve you exporting your products via a CSV file, editing your products in bulk (here is where you would remove the ones you don't want moving forward) and importing the new updated CSV file back into your store where the 1,500 + products would no longer be there. Something to note with this method is to make sure you select the Overwrite existing product option or it will not work. 

I know this might not be completely ideal, but other than deleting the products on a page by page basis, this is the quickest and most efficient method for removing such a large number of products. 

Hope it helps! 

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

CiprianX
Shopify Partner
2 0 1

Hi Nick,

 

Thanks a lot for getting back.

 

Although I tried your method (to overwrite) it actually still duplicates the products.

 

Even worse, it does not upload all the products. I have around 2000 products but it uploads around 100-200 products only.

 

I understand it might take longer but even after one night the products have not been uploaded.

 

Thank you,

Ciprian

Renars
Shopify Partner
284 31 332

Hello Ciprian.

 

For this task, you could use Excelify.io App. We have a great tutorial on how to delete a large number of items with ease - https://excelify.io/2017/09/28/shopify-bulk-delete-products/

You can also use it to create and update various items in your Shopify store without replacing existing items.

 

If you have further questions about it you can contact us by any means listed in our Contact Us page - https://excelify.io/contact-us/

 

Renars

Matrixify | Bulk Import Export Update | https://apps.shopify.com/excel-export-import | https://matrixify.app
renmarth1510
Visitor
2 0 2

this doesnt work . . shopify sucks . .can't even perform bulk product delete ...

Apexxo
Tourist
4 1 0

I have the same issue. Still after so many months no solution to even delete products! 

AmitOX
Tourist
3 0 0

Same problome with a same opinion abut this platform

Eric_Seastrand
Shopify Partner
53 3 48

It's very unfortunate and disheartening: I ran into this same issue... on a PLUS store!

 

We were able to quickly write a script to delete everything through the API (which worked fine). But it's troubling that we had to do that in the first place. What would a regular old merchant do?

asdf2
Visitor
1 0 0

"solution" doesn't work. import would be total bs if would delete products that aren't in the imported file anyways.

mauricioarango
Tourist
7 1 2

Fall 2020 and I have to delete more than 1000 products in small batches (!!). The 'delete all products' simply doesn't work. It doesn't give any feedback either... it says it will delete the products but nothing happens.

And even when deleting small batches (50 products at once), sometimes I have to delete the same batch several times because Shopify fails. Not good.

jeds
Visitor
2 0 29

Just adding another voice here. It's hard to put into words how sad this is. It's not some expanded feature. If you cannot add and delete products without error you don't even support basic functionality to ship this to a customer.

PookSolutions
Visitor
1 0 0

Also getting this issue, Jul 2021 😕

Shay
Shopify Staff
2780 440 566

Hi @PookSolutions 

Thank you for reaching out, I understand that you are having issues with deleting all the products in your store. When selecting a large group of products, the delete option should remove every item in your store over time. With large catalogues, it isn't instant but you should see the inventory numbers decreasing over the next few hours. An easy way to check this is by adding /count.json to the end of your products list URL in the admin. 

Example: <yourstoreurl>/admin/products/count.json

This will give you a real time count of your inventory. If the number is not decreasing over time, or if it stops decreasing when there are more to delete, please reach out to our live support so that we can escalate this to our technical team on your beha...

Thank you!

-Shay

Shay | Social Care @ Shopify 
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ezra_bibby
Tourist
8 0 2

same issue here... how is this still a problem.

 

doing my head in

leo_nardo
Visitor
1 0 0

thanks

this save my day!

ErwinPlones
Shopify Partner
9 0 3

this is correct, the delete is very slow

northlandweb
Visitor
2 0 7

This fixed my issue! The deleting is just not instant because of the CDN. All good.

TheHerbologyLab
Visitor
1 0 0

Also getting this issue.... July 2022!!!

Shay
Shopify Staff
2780 440 566

Hi @TheHerbologyLab 

 

Were you able to use the .json link in my earlier post to check and see if your inventory count is decreasing after initiating the deletion?

 

Example: <yourstoreurl>/admin/products/count.json

 

If you don't see the count shown on that page decreasing over time please reach out to our live support for additional troubleshooting help. You can contact our live support through the Help Center and you will want to follow the on screen prompts to see all our live support options. 

 

Are you looking at revamping your current product stock? What kind of products are you planning on listing?

Shay | Social Care @ Shopify 
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 - To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Shopify Blog

JohnSPECO
Visitor
1 0 0

Thanks for the count link.  It is very helpful.

 

Folks are still wondering why the delete process takes so long.  

Having created my own websites (i'm a programmer) I can delete thousands of records in seconds.

Having it take hours does not make any sense.   Looking at this thread, this has been an issue for years.  Why hasn't the issue been addressed?

 

If I am doing a total refresh of my catalog, the site is not going to be of any use to my customers for hours.  I usually try to do this off-peak to avoid that impact.  

Ashley_Marcelli
Shopify Partner
8 0 0

Wow, I am dismayed that deleting products in bulk is such a complicated issue. I have only been able to get this to work once and it took several days to delete all of my products. Are there any new solutions available to delete a large number of products?

Shay
Shopify Staff
2780 440 566

Thank you for the feedback on this topic. At this time bulk product deletion may still require time to process and won't be instantaneous. 

 

One thing I wanted to suggest for anyone thinking about deleting a large catalogue of products is to instead archive the products you no longer want. This can be done in the bulk editor in your store admin. Archiving products allows you to remove them from collections and all sales channels, but still have the product data. Deleting a product from your admin completely also removes all its data, which can affect your sales reports. If the product is no longer there, you will only see NA for that product in your store analytics for any past orders. 

 

Archiving can also be used in the interim to hide unwanted products from customers while you fully remove them from the admin or replace them with a new catalogue of items. 

Shay | Social Care @ Shopify 
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Ablestar_Daniel
Shopify Partner
90 12 16

Another suggesting for deleting a lot of products at once is to try the free plan of our Ablestar Bulk Product Editor app. Using it you can:

  • Filter for the products you want to delete (it can be all products or products that match specific conditions like "doesn't have any images" or out of stock products)
  • Delete the products and view the progress of the deletion

 

Here's a short video showing the feature in action:

 

 

Our free plan includes 5 edits every 30 days (with no limit on the number of products) so it would work great for one-off tasks like this.

 

Best,

Daniel

Founder @ Ablestar ✦
Manage product data, spreadsheets, Google Shopping data, and metafields with Ablestar Bulk Product Editor. Use previews, undos, and automations to be confident your product data is correct.
Please don't forget to Like and Mark Solution to the post that helped you. Thanks!
Jewlosgifts
New Member
4 0 0

Hello,

I want to delete all my product at once and I have over 3,000 plus items, do I do delete everything at once?

 

jasonavada
Shopify Partner
333 11 42

Maybe you should try these steps on this article to delete unwanted or unused files on Shopify. Hit like if it could solve your problem 

I'm Jason Dao, Manager of Research & Development Department at Avada Ecommerce.

harmen2
Tourist
8 0 3

I tried to delete my products and it didnt work

Instead the solution for me was just naming all the products I wanted to delete: "0"

Then I went to collections and removed/deleted all the products named "0"

thereby the products didnt appear anymore on the webshop

 

but to do that you have to:

1 go to "products" -> "collections" and make a collection naming it like "clothing collection"

2 then go to online store -> navigation -> main menu -> add menu item named like "clothing" and for link fill in "clothing colllection" (now it appears on your webshop)

3 then go to "products" -> "collections" adding the products you want to the "clothing collection" (to the collection you made appearing on your webshop)

4 and then you can just remove products from the collection that you dont want and add products you do want

so basically deleting products doesn't work, but deleting products from collections does work and in the end it achieves the same of them not appearing aynmore on your webshop

 

tip: name the products you want to delete just all "0" so in a collection

you can search "0" and delete them all

 

 

movsumov
Shopify Partner
57 1 21
Jewlosgifts
New Member
4 0 0
That was an very old message
movsumov
Shopify Partner
57 1 21

True, I decided to reply for the people who are still having the same problem and landing here after searching. 

jph1
Visitor
2 0 1

Its still a problem, a very frustrating one. The platform is woefully buggy. Literally insane. 

Shay
Shopify Staff
2780 440 566

Hi @jph1 

 

I just wanted to clarify that the process for bulk deleting large quantity of items from your store admin happens in batches and this is expected behavior of the platform. 

 

After you initiate your product deletion in your admin you can track it by using this JSON url in your admin:

 

https://admin.shopify.com/store/your-storename/products/count.json

 

Adding /count.json to your product's page admin URL will show your current inventory count and as it decreases you can see this reflected on this page. 

Shay | Social Care @ Shopify 
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 - Was your question answered? Mark it as an Accepted Solution
 - To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Shopify Blog

jph1
Visitor
2 0 1

Hi @Shay I appreciate the followup. I am speaking to deleting **any** products. Especially across integrators of any kind. Single digits of products. I have a pretty good handle on RDBS and Spark to know its not those...

 

For what we pay monthly, we do expect better. 

Eric_Seastrand
Shopify Partner
53 3 48

Hi @Shay - can you add a little more context to what exact processes are executed when a product is deleted?

As @jph1 points out: a simple DELETE on any RDBS should not take very long.

Of course, a "product" is far more than just a row in a database table: there's assets (photos/videos) to delete, 3rd party apps that need a webhook notification, and possibly internal microservices within Shopify that need time to update their own internal state to gracefully handle a product deletion (ie, orders, inventory, etc..).

 

While I understand this is "working as intended", surely you can agree it's causing real problems/annoyance for some merchants. Otherwise, there wouldn't be 3rd party app developers seizing the opportunity to make money off merchants experiencing this confusing behavior around product deletion. 

 

Clearly, it's not well-understood by the community - exactly what goes into product deletion which makes it take so long. Hoping for some clarification from an official source.