[January 23rd, 2024]
Cleaning up your catalog can feel like a massive undertaking, but it doesn’t have to be. Let’s break it into small, feasible steps and provide the tools to get your catalog back on track.
Overall, we recommend deleting products you’re no longer selling and not planning to sell in the future. This helps clean up your POS so both systems can run more efficiently in three steps:
This article is just one of three focused on cleaning up your account. For all the tips, click this button:
Before you delete anything…
Deleting a product in Thrive will remove it from your sales channels and integrations.
This is an irreversible process that deletes the product across all locations. •
The inventory and sales histories will be preserved in reports, even once a product is deleted. In other words, deleting an item will not affect your history (except for products with Inventory Tracking disabled).
You can read more about deleting products here.
PRO-TIP:
The tools below help identify specific product trends that may indicate that you want to delete the product, but each business is different, so please be sure to use your discretion.
1) Identifying products to delete
The first step is to identify the products you'd like to delete. This process will vary depending on your business, but we'll go ahead and outline our best tools for the job below.
Remember that if you have multiple locations, you'll want to ensure you're not deleting a product from all locations just because it isn't selling at one location.
Find products that haven't sold lately:
Dead Inventory Report
This report lets you see all the products that haven’t sold in a certain number of days. Whether you’re looking to pinpoint products that haven’t sold in 30, 60, 90, or any number of days, this report is what you need.
You can see for yourself here, or you can learn more.
In addition, if you're ensuring accurate inventory quantities by performing Stocktakes, the Due for Stocktakes Report can help you find products that have yet to be counted in a certain amount of days.
This may help pinpoint products that may have gone overlooked.
Find null (blank) quantities:
Null (or blank) quantities indicate a product was created, but a quantity was never added.
To pinpoint these null quantities, go to your Products page and sort the "Qty In Stock" column in ascending order. The null quantities will be at the top of the page, as shown here:
Finding zero quantities
Open an Edit Variants bulk upload spreadsheet.
When generating the spreadsheet, ensure all locations are toggled on and the "Out of Stock" toggle. This will ensure you only see products "out of stock" across all your locations when the spreadsheet generates.
Otherwise, if you only have one location, you can also use the Filter on the Products page to show only products that are "Out of Stock."
Find negative quantities:
You should not have products with negative quantities. If you have any, we recommend researching why and then updating the count in Thrive.
To pinpoint any negative quantities, run an Inventory Report for "Now."
Then, sort the "In Stock" column in ascending order (either on the report itself or by downloading a CSV). Your "highest" negative quantity will be at the top of the list.
2) Marking products for deletion (optional)
You can delete products individually, but if you want to do this in bulk, we recommend marking them for deletion.
By "marking for deletion," we mean grouping all of the products you want to delete and then using our bulk delete tool to eliminate those products.
To do that, we recommend creating a new vendor or category with a clear title that indicates that the products assigned to it are safe for deletion. Generally, we recommend "TO BE DELETED" in all caps to ensure someone doesn't use it for a product you'd like to keep.
Once that's created, you can have a few options:
Assign products to the new Category or Vendor in bulk via an Edit Variants bulk upload spreadsheet.
Bulk assign the products from the Category or Vendor pages in Thrive.
And, of course, you can always assign products/variants individually to the new Category or Vendor from their product page.
3) Deleting unwanted products
If you've used the method of "marking" your products for deletion by assigning them to a designated Category or Vendor, the bulk delete tool is your go-to option. Follow these steps to clear out those unwanted products:
Open the bulk delete tool by going to the Products page, clicking the Actions button, and selecting "Delete Variants."
Click the Filter button, and filter by your newly created Category or Vendor.
Locate the "Add loaded variants to the Variants to Delete list (number/number)" hyperlink.
Make sure all the possible variants are loaded. For example, if it says 390/390, then everything has loaded.
Click the "Add loaded variants.." hyperlink to move the desired products to the right side of the modal.
Click the blue "Delete" button.
Follow the prompts on the next screen and then click the red Delete button.
You can also delete products from their Edit Product page. You can learn more about both methods here.
What if I delete a product on accident?
There is not a tool to bring back accidentally deleted products. So, we recommend checking and double-checking your list before deleting any products.
The product will need to be recreated. For product information (SKU, barcode, price, cost, etc.), we recommended generating an Inventory Report right before it was deleted and using the information to recreate it.
Looking for more help?
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