Sometimes you will want to delete your products in bulk. The most common method to achieve this is by selecting all the products you want to delete from the Product page and then performing the bulk action by moving products to trash.
But if you have hundreds and thousands of products to delete, the above-mentioned method will be tiresome. This is where the second, simple and effective method comes into play. The extension plugin Product Import Export Plugin For WooCommerce will be very useful to delete products via the CSV effectively.
How to Delete Products through CSV import?
First of all, install Product Import Export Plugin For WooCommerce to your WooCommerce store and activate the plugin.
Make sure that you have the file, that doesn’t have any of the products that needed to be deleted, in your computer, another server, or in any other location accessible via URL.
Now, follow the steps given below and you can easily delete products in bulk through CSV import.
- Select a file to be imported from one of the three sources
- Select option to delete products in the store
- Map imported columns to product data fields and Import
Step 1: Select file to be imported from one of the three sources
Log into your account and use the sidebar navigation menu to:
- Navigate to the WebToffee Import Export (Pro)
- Click on the Import sub-tab, you will be taken to the ‘Import’ page
- Select ‘Product’ post-type to import
- Select a source of the file to be imported
- Method 1: Select a file from your computer
- Method 2: Provide FTP details
- Method 3: Enter the URL of the file
Select a file from your computer
By using this method you can select a file(less than 1GB size) from your computer by clicking on the Choose file button. Then, select the file that needs to be imported.
Provide FTP details
This method helps you to import products from another server via FTP. For that enable FTP import and fill out all the necessary fields as shown below.
Method 3: Enter the URL of the file
Provide the URL of the CSV where it can be downloaded from within the Enter the URL of the file text field. It is to be noted that the URL should be a public URL for it to be accessed for files for importing.
Example: https://www.webtoffee.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Product_WooCommerce_Sample_CSV.csv
From the above three methods select one of the convenient methods and follow the steps below.
Step 2: Map imported columns to product data fields and Import
After uploading the CSV file containing products you need to move to the next step Import – Map Fields page. Here you can map the CSV file to the WooCommerce data fields. Mapping is required to ensure that the column headers in the CSV file match with the corresponding WooCommerce data fields.
Step 3: Select the option to delete products in the store
In the next step, the Advanced Options section. You will find an option to Delete non-matching products from store.
By choosing ‘Yes’ you will be able to delete existing products in your store that are not present in the CSV.
Now you can click on the import button.
After, click on the Submit button you can see the progress of the import as given below
Once you have successfully imported the products you will get rid of all the existing products in the store.
Conclusion
By following these simple steps you will be able to delete hundreds of products easily and quickly along with importing new products at the same time. Learn about getting started and working with the plugin from the plugin documentation.
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Comments (7)
Vithlesh
August 22, 2021
Hii I want to delete product when I scan QR code of product through mobile, so it should delete the product directly from woocomerce database. Is it possible? If yes, than please share its solution on my mail.
vithlesh14@gmail.com
Mark
August 25, 2021
Hi,
You can delete certain products from the site by not including them in the CSV file and then import the CSV file with the Delete non-matching products from store option enabled so that all the products that are not in the SV file will be deleted. Please make sure that you either include ID or SKU in the CSV file and is mapped.
Kristian Brown
August 14, 2020
This is almost 100% the opposite way I’d want to remove products in bulk – by uploading all the details of the ones I want to keep?
I searched everywhere to find somewhere to help me delete products based on a list of SKUs given to me by a shop manager. In the end I’ve written some simple instructions using SQL to convert SKU’s to post_ids then clean up the post table and post_meta tables. I’ve shared it here; https://kristianbrown.co.uk/delete-woocommerce-products-using-skus/
Phil Birnie
October 22, 2020
I agree – it would be great if you could upload a CSV with a single column of SKUs and it would delete that set.
Alan
October 22, 2020
Hi,
Thank you for your valuable suggestion. We have included it in our development backlogs and will try to implement it in the upcoming releases.
Christian Brand
November 4, 2021
Is this feature already implemented? Currently this is exactly what I need 🙂
Alan
November 9, 2021
Hi,
Sorry to say that this feature is not yet implemented. Currently you can delete the products that are in the CSV file by setting the post_status as “trash” and those products will be moved to the trash.