In this article, we explain how to discontinue or hide products from the catalog of your WooCommerce store.
Some reasons for discontinuing products can be fixed bugs, product updates, or discontinuation of other websites.
In these cases, the most immediate option is to delete them or convert them to drafts so that they do not appear in your store’s catalog.
This option, although immediate, is not as convenient for the following reasons:
- Your site’s SEO will be negatively affected.
- You could end up with hundreds of broken links in your store.
- You could lose the opportunity to sell related products by suggesting them on the discontinued product page.
That’s why, in this tutorial, instead of selecting and removing each product individually, we show you how to use bulk actions in WooCommerce.
We will explain to you how to use the bulk edit tool, which allows you to remove all products selected from the catalog.
You will save a lot of time because you won’t have to edit one product at a time, and you will avoid falling into the mistakes we mentioned above.
Install WP Sheet Editor and WooCommerce Discontinued Products
The WP Sheet Editor plugin allows you to apply changes to thousands of products with just some clicks. It includes powerful tools such as the “Apply changes in bulk” and the “Search” tool.
You can download the plugin here:
Download WooCommerce Products Spreadsheet Plugin - or - Check the features
WooCommerce Discontinued Products adds a “Discontinued” stock status to WooCommerce so that you can manage end-of-life products separately from other stock statuses (e.g. out of stock).
It also preserves the SEO for your discontinued product pages and helps to keep customers informed.
Together, these plugins can be used to discontinue products from your WooCommerce catalog in bulk.
You can skip this step if you have both plugins installed and activated.
Once you install and activate both plugins, go to WP Sheet Editor > Edit Products, and you’ll see the spreadsheet containing all your products and their complete data.
1- Discontinue products individually using the spreadsheet
Using the products spreadsheet, you can edit many products without having to open many pages.
To discontinue your products individually using the spreadsheet:
- Go to the Manage Stock column and disable this option.
- Go to the Stock Status column and select Discontinue.
- Hit Save to apply the changes.
2- Discontinue selected products in bulk
Besides discontinuing products individually using the spreadsheet (which helps you save time by the way), you can bulk discontinue selected products using our Bulk Edit tool.
First, let’s see how you can filter the products you want to discontinue. For this, let’s use the Search tool.
This tool allows you to search for your WooCommerce products using any field and value as a search parameter. In this example, we’ll search for the products containing the “jeans” keyword in their titles.
- Enter the desired keyword in Contains Keyword.
- Hit Run search.
Now that your products were filtered, they will be displayed on the spreadsheet.
Before enabling the Discontinued stock status, you need to disable the Manage Stock checkbox for all the selected products.
For this, open the Bulk Edit tool to discontinue all the filtered products.
Once you’re in the Bulk Edit tool, select the following values to disable the Manage Stock option for all the selected products:
- Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
- What field do you want to edit: Manage Stock
- Select type of edit: Set value
- Replace existing value with this value: No
- Hit Execute Now.
Finally, open the Bulk Edit tool again and select the following values to bulk discontinue all the filtered products:
- Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
- What field do you want to edit: Stock status
- Select type of edit: Set value
- Replace existing value with this value: Discontinued
- Hit Execute Now.
Once the bulk edit is complete, you can go to the Stock Status column, and you’ll see that the Manage Stock checkbox is disabled and the Discontinued value has been applied to all the filtered products.
3- Easily find all discontinued products in your store
The Search tool allows you to use any field as a search parameter, and the Discontinued value is no exception.
Let’s see how to find all the discontinued products in your store.
Just open the Search tool.
Once you open the tool, you need to do this to search for all the discontinued products in your store:
- Tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox and select the following values.
- Field: Stock status
- Operator: =
- Value: Discontinued
- Now just hit Run Search.
Once you run the search, the plugin will find and display all the discontinued products on the spreadsheet. You can see the applied filter above the spreadsheet.
4- Optional – Add a message to discontinued product titles
Step 1. Find the discontinued products by following the steps in the previous section.
Step 2. Open the “Bulk Edit” tool.
Step 3. Select the following values to add a “Discontinued product” message at the end of the product titles:
- Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
- What field do you want to edit: Title
- Select type of edit: Append
- Enter the value to append to the existing value: Make sure you add some spaces before the message you’ll append. For example, we’ll add this ” – Discontinued Product”, but we won’t add the quotation marks.
- Hit Execute Now.
And this is what your discontinued product titles will look like on the spreadsheet:
5- Optional – Add a message at the beginning of the product descriptions
You can quickly add a message to the content of your discontinued product. Just follow these simple steps:
Step 1. Find your discontinued products using the Search tool.
Step 2. Open the Bulk Edit tool.
Step 3. Use these values to add the message to your discontinued product descriptions
- Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
- What field do you want to edit: Content
- Select type of edit: Prepend
- Enter the value to append to the existing value: In this case, we want the text we’ll append to be a subtitle, so we’ll add this: <h2>Discontinued product </h2>
- Click on Execute Now.
Now you can go to the Content column, and you’ll see the h2 message has been prepended correctly to your product content.
Stop losing customers and Google rankings!
Now it will be clear to your customers that the products are discontinued, and you don’t have to delete them to lose your Google rankings.
Definitely, WP Sheet Editor and WooCommerce Discontinued Products help you easily bulk discontinue thousands of products at once.
If you want to hide hundreds of products from your catalog instead of discontinuing them, check out this tutorial.
You can download the plugin here:
Download WooCommerce Products Spreadsheet Plugin - or - Check the features