Is there a way to delete products without affecting orders or reports?

I did a test with one product and deleted it and it still showed up when I searched for that order but I wasn't able to generate a sales report showing any of the sales.

If a product is deleted do the sales for that product still show in the monthly & yearly totals?

I would like to clean up my site a little but don't want to delete anything that will change my reports.

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

The option to "delete" a product in the CP actually just removes it from the catalog. It still exists in the database, but with a flag that it has been removed. This will prevent it from showing in most places in the CP (e.g. Locate a Product) and remove it completely from showing on the front end. It will also prevent past orders with such a product from crashing (because such a product record no longer exited in the database).

To truly delete products from the database, you really have to go out of your way (it's in the wiki -- our team likes to call it the nuclear option).

If removing a product from the catalog is removing it from reports, that would definitely be a bug. Please let us know what version you are running and I'll check it out. Adjusting the report queries for this, if necessary, would be very simple.

However, truly deleting products from the db would cause failure on previous orders, reports, etc. as the record would not exist anymore (though I'd expect that most reports should run off of data on products ordered, not the product records themselves).

Either way, having some 4K products either shunted to a hidden category, or similarly using the PC option to "delete"/remove a product is of no concern on a SQL db (that's a pretty small number for such a db platform) and wouldn't slow anything down as I see it, as those records simply wouldn't be part of any SQL queries on the front end, and nothing of significance on the back end.

I have deleted some items and tested several reports and I thought I would share what I found:

- the sales figures for the deleted items stay in the reports that show sales by date but it no longer shows in the sales by Product or Category.

- nothing changes on the orders themselves - the product info is always available there.

I'm glad to hear that having 4K of inactive products in a hidden category isn't a problem and won't slow things down as this was a bit of a concern.