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.

The three-step process:

Important things to know about deleting:

It's permanent: 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.

History is preserved: 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.

The first step is to identify the products you'd like to delete. This process will vary depending on your business, but we'll outline our best tools for the job below.

Use the Dead Inventory Report to 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.

Bonus tool: If you're ensuring accurate inventory quantities by performing Stocktakes, the Due for Stocktakes Report can help you find products that haven't been counted in a certain number of days. This may help pinpoint products that may have gone overlooked.

Different quantity issues point to different problems—here's how to find each type.

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:

Products with zero quantity might be discontinued items or products waiting to be restocked. These options provide an alternative to using the Variants View way described above

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.

If you only have one location, you can also use the Filter on the old Products page to show only products that are "Out of Stock."

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.

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.

Option 1: Bulk assign via spreadsheet Assign products to the new Category or Vendor in bulk via an Edit Variants bulk upload spreadsheet.

Option 2: Bulk assign from Category or Vendor pages Bulk assign the products from the Category or Vendor pages in Thrive.

Option 3: Individual assignment And, of course, you can always assign products/variants individually to the new Category or Vendor from their product page.

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:

You can also delete products from the Edit Product page.

Unfortunately, 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 manually. For product information (SKU, barcode, price, cost, etc.), we recommend:

Pro tip: Keep a backup Inventory Report as CSV before major deletions. It's your safety net!

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