Deleting products and variants in the shop

David Rossall asked on September 29, 2021 10:44

After a year of running Kentico 12/13 MVC, we're trying to understand the best approach towards maintaining the shop products as the range evolves over time. Specifically, we can't delete variants that have been used in orders, and we can't delete products that have been ordered. I assume that this is to preserve data integrity although, because we transfer orders to our internal systems for processing, reporting on historical online orders is of limited importance for us.

In particular we are finding that the process of editing new product and related pages is becoming cumbersome because editors are offered a range of redundant variants and products. On our test platform, where things may have been created experimentally, the clutter is even worse. Generally, deletion attempts are rejected because the item has been used in an order, but without an option, for example, to identify the order, delete or archive that, and then return to removing the variant or product.

Our developers are heavily loaded, and ideally this would be an administrative task, consistently with fact that editors/administrators create the products in the first place!

kentico

Recent Answers

Dmitry Bastron answered on September 29, 2021 12:58

Hi David,

I can't remember anything out of the box that can support this data cleansing task I'm afraid. And the main reason for this is that every organization is very different in terms of its data cleanse policies. But I think here is what you can do:

Implement a custom scheduled task that will be cleaning our orders older than N months
Make a report on deactivated products that are no longer present in the orders
Regularly delete the products from the report above
If your website offers order history functionality, consider fetching it directly from your master data storage (CRM maybe?) rather than from Kentico database

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David Rossall answered on September 29, 2021 17:33

Hi Dmitry

Thanks. I think the answer then is that our developers do have to build something custom - as I said, we hoped to avoid that. I'm not sure about the differing policies - I think common tools can often support different approaches, just as they do in creation.

We're still really pleased with Kentico a year on. However, if there is an area where I'd like to see more, I think it is around this kind of content management as opposed to content creation. There are a number of areas where I think that there could be tools to help keep a site effective (and therefore its content clean) several years after its launch.

Anyway, the answer is helpful and I'll get back to our team about it.

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