Discontinued Products for WooCommerce

Our Discontinued Products for WooCommerce plugin makes it easy to manage your inactive or end-of-life products.

Install the plugin

Once you have purchased Discontinued Products for WooCommerce, you can download the plugin files and copy your license key directly from the Order Confirmation page. You’ll also receive a confirmation email containing your license key and a download link to the plugin.

1. Download the plugin.
2. Go to your WordPress admin, then go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
3. Click “Choose File”, select the woocommerce-discontinued-products.zip file you just downloaded and click “Install”.
4. Once uploaded, click “Activate”.

Once you’ve installed Discontinued Products for WooCommerce, remember to keep it up to date. Read more about plugin updates.

Enter your license key

Once you have activated the plugin:

1. Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Discontinued products and enter your license key. You can get this from the Order Confirmation page and the email confirmation that was sent to you after purchase.
2. Click Save Changes to validate and store your license key.

If you get an error saving your license key, please try a second time. If the error persists, please search for your error above or view our article on license key problems.

Plugin settings

• Discontinued text: Enter the text which will appear for your discontinued products. This is a plain text field and appears in the same place that your theme would normally display the ‘out of stock’ message, in the same style.
• Hide products: This option is enabled by default and hides all discontinued products and variations from the store. You don’t have to worry about marking them as hidden manually. The URL will still be accessible, so the product can still rank in search engines and customers who have bookmarked the page can still access it. However, it won’t appear in public parts of your store such as the shop or category pages.
  • If you choose to show discontinued products in the store, then it will appear in product listings as usual. When a customer clicks through to a discontinued product, the ‘Discontinued text’ will appear explaining that the product has been discontinued.
• Show label: This option is enabled by default and allows you to display a label over the product image on your shop pages and the single product page. This helps to make it more obvious to customers that a product is discontinued.
  • When you enable this option, a Label text option appears underneath. You can use this to customize the text that appears over the product image.

That’s it! The plugin is fully set up, and you’re ready to start marking specific products as discontinued.

Further reading: Top tips on how to get sales from your discontinued product pages.

Start marking products as discontinued

Sometimes, you want to sell the remaining stock for a product before discontinuing it. You can discontinue products immediately, or when stock is depleted, for both simple and variable products.

Discontinue a product immediately:

1. Edit the product that you want to discontinue.
   • If you want to discontinue a specific variation, you must do so under the “Variations” tab.
2. Go to the “Inventory” tab and select Discontinued from the stock status dropdown.
   • If you can’t see the stock status dropdown, you may need to disable the “Manage stock” setting.
3. Save the product, you’re done!

Note that you can also discontinue all variations at once from the “Add variation” menu. Choose the “Set Status – Discontinued” option, and this will mark all of your variations as discontinued in bulk.

Discontinue a product when stock reaches zero

1. Edit the product that you want to discontinue.
   • If you want to discontinue a specific variation, you must do so under the “Variations” tab.
2. Go to the “Inventory” tab and and make sure the “Manage stock” setting is enabled, and that you’ve entered the number of items remaining in stock.
3. Enable the “Discontinue product” setting.
4. Save the product.

When you do this, the product will remain available for purchase for as long as the stock level is greater than zero. When the stock level reaches zero, the product stock status will change to “Discontinued” and the usual discontinued message will appear.

Note: This method will only work for individual variations with “Manage stock” enabled. If you are managing stock at the parent product level instead, then you need to discontinue the main product instead. This will discontinue all the variations where stock is managed at the product page.

Discontinue products in bulk

The plugin provides a quick way to discontinue multiple products at once:

1. Go to your products list, and select the ones you want to discontinue.
2. Open the bulk actions dropdown and click “Edit”, then “Apply”.
3. Select the “Discontinued” status from the “In stock?” dropdown.
4. Click “Update” to finish your bulk edit.

Please note that if you discontinue a variable product using this bulk action, then all the variations for that product will be discontinued.

FAQs