How to Delete Products from Shopify: Step-by-Step Guide

Managing a Shopify store involves more than just adding new products; it also requires regular housekeeping to maintain your inventory. At times, you may need to delete outdated, discontinued, or underperforming products to keep your catalog clean. But why is this important? Deleting unnecessary products enhances your store’s user experience, improves SEO, and helps align your inventory with your business goals.

This guide explains how to delete products from Shopify, covering everything from individual deletions to bulk actions. We’ll also explore alternatives like archiving and creating backups to safeguard your product data. Whether you’re reorganizing your catalog, rebranding, or simply decluttering, this article has everything you need to confidently manage your Shopify inventory.

Why Delete Products from Shopify?

Running a Shopify store often requires regular maintenance to ensure a streamlined shopping experience and optimal performance. Many store owners face an essential task: deciding whether and why to delete products. Here’s why this action might be necessary — and how it can benefit your business:

• Outdated or Discontinued Products. Are you still showcasing products that are no longer available? Keeping outdated or discontinued items in your catalog can confuse shoppers and waste their time. Removing these listings prevents customers from encountering “Out of Stock” frustrations and improves their shopping experience. Ask yourself: Are outdated products cluttering your store and making navigation difficult?
• Improving Catalog Organization. A cluttered product catalog can overwhelm customers. If certain items no longer fit your brand’s direction, deleting them helps simplify navigation. An organized catalog boosts user experience and ensures customers find what they’re looking for more easily.
• SEO Optimization and Site Speed. Did you know that having too many unnecessary product pages can dilute your SEO efforts? Deleting irrelevant or duplicate products ensures your store’s SEO strategy remains focused. This can also improve site loading times — a key factor for user retention and search engine rankings.
• Rebranding or Seasonal Adjustments. Is your store transitioning to a new niche or branding strategy? Removing products that no longer align with your brand helps reinforce your new identity. Similarly, clearing out seasonal items at the end of their relevance ensures your catalog remains fresh and appealing. However, it is better to archive Shopify products when it comes to seasonal items.
• Decluttering Low-Performing Products. Do you have products that haven’t sold in months? These low-performing items could be skewing your business analytics and draining resources like storage and marketing focus. Deleting them allows you to focus on your bestsellers and optimize operations. Or you can add them to your archive. Think about this: Could eliminating poor performers free up time and resources to grow your business?

Deleting products isn’t just about removing items; it’s about creating a better shopping experience, improving SEO, and aligning your store with your goals. Whether you’re managing seasonal changes, adjusting to customer demand, or simply decluttering, removing products can be a strategic move to keep your Shopify store in top shape.

What’s stopping you from cleaning up your Shopify product catalog today? Let’s see how to do that. Let’s explore how it’s done.

How to Delete Products from Shopify

Deleting products in Shopify is a straightforward process, whether you’re removing a single item or performing a bulk deletion. However, keep in mind that once a product is deleted, it cannot be restored directly from Shopify. To safeguard your data, it’s a good idea to export the product before deletion, allowing you to re-import it later if needed. We will return to it below.

If you’re sure you want to permanently remove a product, the following options are at your disposal:

• Delete a Single Product. Navigate to the Products page in your Shopify admin, select the product, and click Delete. Confirm your action to finalize the removal.
• Bulk Delete Multiple Products. Use the bulk action tool to select multiple products for deletion. This is ideal for cleaning up outdated inventory quickly.
• Export Before Deleting (Optional but Recommended). Export your product data to a CSV file as a backup. This file can be re-imported later if you decide to restore the deleted products.

If you still need to eliminate a Shopify product permanently, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Shopify Products page in your admin.
   
2. Open the product you want to delete.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Delete product.
   
4. Confirm your intent.

That’s how you delete a single product from Shopify on its details screen. However, there is one more way to get rid of the unnecessary items.

How to Bulk Delete Shopify Products

Follow these steps to delete products from Shopify in bulk:

1. Navigate to Shopify Admin -> Products.
   
2. Select the products you want to delete. Note that you can use this method to delete a single Shopify product without visiting its details page.
   
3. Click More actions (three dots on the top right corner of the Products grid) and hit Delete products.
   
4. Confirm your intent.
   

Deleting products permanently is a powerful tool for maintaining a clean and efficient catalog, but always double-check before taking this irreversible step!

To ensure important products aren’t accidentally deleted, consider archiving them instead or creating backups. Let’s dive into each of these alternatives below.

Why Choose Archiving Over Deleting Shopify Products?

When managing your Shopify store, deciding whether to archive or delete products can have a significant impact on your operations. While deleting products removes them permanently, archiving provides a non-permanent solution that preserves essential data for future reference. Here’s why archiving might be the better option for your business:

1. Preserve Product Data. Archiving allows you to retain important details like product descriptions, pricing, and sales history without displaying the items to customers. This is especially useful for seasonal or discontinued items that may be returned later.
2. Simplify Future Restocking. If you plan to reintroduce a product in the future, archiving saves you the hassle of recreating the product page from scratch. Simply unarchive the item when it’s time to restock.
3. Maintain Accurate Analytics. Deleting a product can skew your store’s analytics by removing historical data. Archiving ensures your reports remain consistent and accurate, providing a complete view of sales and performance trends.
4. Better Organization Without Permanent Loss. Archiving keeps your storefront clean by hiding irrelevant items from public view while allowing you to revisit and manage them in the backend.
5. Reassess Product Viability Later. Not all products fail to perform forever. Archiving gives you time to evaluate whether a product could benefit from rebranding, repackaging, or better marketing strategies before making a final decision to delete.

Archiving Shopify products offers flexibility and safeguards essential data, making it a great choice for those who want to keep their options open. To learn how to archive products step-by-step, check out our guide to archiving Shopify products.

If you’ve decided that deleting is the better option for your store, remember to create a backup before proceeding to avoid losing important data permanently.

How to Safeguard Your Products with Backups Before Deleting

Before deleting products in Shopify, creating a backup is crucial to ensure you don’t lose important data. Even when archiving products, having a backup provides an additional layer of security in case of accidental deletion or data corruption. A robust backup practice safeguards your store’s product information — descriptions, metadata, pricing, and more — for future use or reference.

Here is why backups matter for your Shopify store:

1. Prevent Data Loss. Deleting a product without a backup results in the permanent loss of crucial details. A backup ensures that your product data is always accessible.
2. Simplify Restocking and Relisting. With a backup in place, reintroducing deleted products is a seamless process. All product details are ready to restore, saving you time and effort.
3. Protect Against Human Error. Mistakes happen — whether it’s accidentally deleting products or overwriting data. A comprehensive backup allows you to recover quickly without disrupting your store.
4. Support Store Migrations or Expansions. Backups are invaluable when migrating your store to a new platform or expanding to another Shopify account, ensuring all your product data transitions smoothly.

While Shopify’s native export tool offers a basic backup option, the Import & Export Tool by Firebear delivers advanced features tailored to e-commerce businesses:

• Automated Backups: Schedule regular backups to ensure your product data is always up to date without manual intervention.
• Flexible File Formats: Save your backups in formats like CSV and XLSX, or maintain a live, automatically updating Google Sheets file.
• Centralized Storage: Manage all backups in one place for easy access and organization.
• Advanced Import Options: Beyond backups, the tool supports importing products, order fulfillments, and customers with automation, file format versatility, and AI-powered data mapping to simplify your operations.

Backing up your Shopify products is more than just a precaution — it’s a best practice that ensures the security and continuity of your store. Backups provide peace of mind and simplify future tasks like restocking or migrating data.

Ready to elevate your backup strategy? Contact us now to learn more about the Firebear Import & Export Tool and experience advanced features designed to protect and optimize your Shopify store.

Final Words

Deleting products from Shopify is a powerful way to maintain a streamlined, efficient, and SEO-friendly store. However, it’s an irreversible step that requires careful planning. Before you delete, consider alternatives like archiving products to retain valuable data without displaying it on your storefront. Archiving provides a flexible solution, especially for seasonal or temporarily unavailable items.

For added security, creating backups is an essential best practice. Backups allow you to preserve crucial product details like descriptions, pricing, and sales history, ensuring you can recover or reuse the data whenever necessary. Tools like our Import & Export Tool simplify this process by offering advanced features like automated scheduling, versatile file formats, and centralized storage.

Ready to clean up your Shopify store? Explore our guide to archiving products in Shopify for a non-permanent approach, or take the next step with the Import & Export Tool for Shopify to protect your data. If deleting products is the path you choose, don’t forget to create a backup to avoid any regrets! Your store’s organization and performance will thank you.

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