Best way to turn off or remove large number of products?

Hi. My vendor described over 400 products erroneously as coming with a CD. Since my site is about products with CDs, I need to turn those products off or remove them.

I am thinking about what is best for the efficient operation of the site. I have about 1700 products plus the 400 I need to remove.

1. If I remove them completely, one by one, will that speed up the site?

2. I am assuming if I just turn them off, it will slow down the site. Is that correct?

3. I thought of making a new category of these products, which would allow them to be all in the same place. That would cause them to be listed twice but because they would then be in the same location, I could more easily delete them from the original categories and then either leave them as a new category without CD at maybe a bargain price, or use this as a way to find them and delete them more easily than searching for the product numbers in many categories and deleting one by one.

4. Is there possibly a quick way to just use PHPMyAdmin to change the setting from on to off, so as to bypass the Zen Cart Admin process which takes so much time one-by-one?

I prefer quicker methods, so assuming I need to go through Admin to make things work right, I am leaning towards setting them in a new category using Easy Populate as in #3 to simplify finding the products, deleting from the 2nd category, and then possibly just deleting the entire new category.

Thanks for any opinions or information.

I've found the quickest way to deal with large amounts of products that you want to disappear is to switch them to 'off'.

You can do this on the admin > catalogue > categories/products page where you switch the traffic light to red instead of green.

Or a quicker way to batch switch products off is to use easy populate.

You can download your enitire catalogue to csv format, open it with microsoft excel and then switch products to off. Its column 'W' and its titled 'v_status'. If you run through that column and switch all the items you want switch off to '0' instead of '1' then when you upload the changed csv file all the items you switched off will be off.

As for deleting them, I'm not sure the quickest way. But if you switch them off their info won't be requested so your website will stay fast. Also, you keep the information, so if its just a matter of editing it you can do that at a later date, rather than starting from scratch.

Hope this helps!

Epsonprinterstock,

I needed the encouragement to try to work within Admin, as that always seems to daunt me, as I am always in a hurry.

I had completely forgotten about the feature in Easy Populate to change status from active to inactive. That seems perfect for my purposes.

Thank you for saving me tons of time and anguish.

Notageek

notageek, not even a problem. Glad I was able to help.

A good feature of the admin traffic lights system is that you can run through them, clicking down the traffic lights and as long as you're quick you can switch on or off a whole batch of them. But its harder to delete them. You have to click three times for each product. :frusty:

Glad you are able to use easy populate to solve another of lifes problems!! Don't forget to use the sort funtion in excel (A-Z) so you can quickly organise your cells. eg. to switch off all products made by the manufacturer 'epson' go to the manufacturer column and sort (A-Z), then you can just replace the status of those ones without affecting the others.

:yes: happy to have helped :yes:

how do you download the catalog?

Hi Dudemaaan, firstly you have to have easypopulate installed.

Then on the admin page of your website go to tools>easy populate.

One of the first options is to download the complete catalogue as a csv file. This is a great way to do major edits, and to save your catalogue as a backup.

Hope that helps. :cool: