Do you need to discontinue a WooCommerce product from your store? If so, I’m sure that by now you’ve realized that WooCommerce doesn’t have a built in way to do this. The good news however is that there are plugins which allow you to create a WooCommerce discontinued product.
In this step by step guide, we’re going to show you exactly how to add the functionality to WooCommerce so that you can start discontinuing products from your store today.
Step 1: Decide on how you want your product to be discontinued
Before we actually install a plugin, there is a chance you may not even need a plugin at all. If you want to hide the product completely from the front end of your website so that no one will ever be able to find it again, then you actually just need to set your WooCommerce product to private.
However, if you actually want the product to be found on your site but not bought by a visitor, then you need to install a plugin to discontinue the product. There are a number of reasons why you would want to discontinue a product instead of hide it:
- Retain the search engine rankings for the product page. If you rank well in the search engines for specific keywords on one of your products, you would not want to lose those rankings by removing the product.
- Allow customers to pre-order the product. You may be anticipating that you’ll be receiving stock of the product at some point in the future and want to still take orders for the product.
- Allow customers to add the product to a wish list. Similar to the above, except you don’t take an order, you may want to just allow customers to add the product to a wish list and gather insights on interest in the product.
If you decide to discontinue the product, rather than hide it, then keep on reading. Otherwise, you should have everything you need already to hide products using the previously linked guide.
Step 2: Install a WooCommerce discontinued product plugin if needed
Ok, so we’ve decided to discontinue. Let’s install a plugin to get this functionality added. WP Geeks is in the process of building out our own WooCommerce discontinued products plugin, but until that is ready, we recommend that you use this plugin (WooCommerce Discontinued Product) to discontinue products.
Download and install the plugin and then move to step 3.
Step 3: Find the product to be discontinued
Now that you’re ready to discontinue a product, you need to find it. Go to “Products” on the right hand side menu and select the product from the list. You can also select the “Edit” button when hovering over the product. See the screenshot below for a reference of what to look for.
Step 4: Discontinue the product in the settings
Lastly, we need to actually discontinue the product itself. From the product page, scroll down to the “Product data” section. Then click “Discontinued Products” on the left hand side. From this tab, you’re able to set the product as discontinued. You can also adjust whether or not to show the product in the front end of the site, add a custom message and assign an alternative product.
And that’s it. We hope you found this guide useful. If you need any assistance, send us a message in the comments below and we’ll do our best to help you out!
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