Use the best Shopify bulk delete products app. It needs to support preview deleting in order to prevent accidental deletion of products, and it needs to not break your SEO by deleting old product URLs. Most apps do the first requirement but not the second. Deleting products is easy. Deleting products without breaking your SEO, not so much.
Seasonal store after the holiday rush. Hundreds of SKUs and URLS for holidays now in the past but that generated organic traffic in the months leading up to today’s dates such as all of the products you sold for Christmas or New Year’s Eve. Deleting those products means that every Google result that links out to your store now returns a 404 error, stripping away link equity and a competitive start to next year.
For the items you want to seasonally bring back to the site to soft delete (draft) these items, and hard delete with 301 redirects to a category page for items that are truly retired. You’ll need an app that is capable of doing both. CS Bulk Delete Products is our #1 recommendation for this type of function, however if you just need to do a 1 time hard delete of unwanted products Hextom Free Bulk Delete Products is a good free alternative.
In this post
- The seasonal SKU problem
- What matters in a delete tool
- 1. CS Bulk Delete Products
- 2. Bulk Product Edit by Hextom
- 3. Matrixify
- 4. Shopify native bulk actions
- Side by side
- A rant about delete-and-pray
- FAQ
The seasonal SKU problem
Once you’ve purged your holiday catalog, you’ll hopefully find that whoever created it and your site’s other catalogs had foresight to assign a tag to the content (e.g. “holiday-2025”). Without these tags, filtering this junk content from past years on your site is manually a laborious process. Luckily, for many of you, some of your products will have also been featured in your site’s content on outside sites, like gift guides on blogs or Pinterest pins that continued to drive a lot of traffic months after the items had been featured in your site’s holiday catalog. Don’t worry the links will still be nofollow. But you should delete these links and the resulting 404s will send a strong signal to Google that something has gone wrong on your site, significantly increasing your site’s bounce rate and seeing your DA dip by a point or two. It’s not the end of the world but it’s something that can be easily avoided.
The hybrid approach on this one: Soft delete items you might need next season (i.e. put them in a “draft” status) and then hard delete items – with a 301 redirect to a category page for the items you never intend to use again – that you know you’ll never need again. You need an application that can support both approaches as well as scheduling for the soft un-deletion process. See 301 Redirects to a Category Page for more on the redirect portion of this approach.
What matters in a delete tool
The following 4 features in this order: level of filtering precision, preview before committing changes, soft delete, and support for URL redirects.
Filter. I need to be able to narrow down the products in the catalog using tags, vendors, collections and also by the current inventory level (Low, Out of Stock, etc.) as well as the date a product was created. I should be able to apply filters using any combination of these criteria. So the command “Delete all products tagged holiday-2025 with zero stock” would be 1 query. Currently I would have to search for all holiday-2025 products, then low inventory products, then products created before Dec 1st.
Preview changes before committing them. All deletions are forever. (Except maybe for artist images, but I’m not going to promise anything on that front.) Any product deletions should be previewed on the server with a full list of products to be deleted, along with a count, a sample of their titles, and a checkbox next to the filter name that must be manually selected. Having a big red Delete button next to the filter is a footgun.
Soft delete. For seasonal stores, “delete” is the wrong verb. You want “hide”. Use a status of “draft”, keep the URL or the URL and domain alive or redirected and bring it back next season. A real bulk tool would treat status of “draft” as a first-class feature instead of a hack.
Redirect support. So when you do a hard delete (which we do want to make easier) you also create a 301 redirect from the old product to the parent (or other chosen page) – all in one hit. Otherwise you have to do 2 cleanups – one for the deleted products, and then the cleanup of the broken links.
1. CS Bulk Delete Products
Bulk Delete Products on the Shopify App Store. Our version. We built this app because soft delete with scheduled un-delete is a real need for merchants but something that Shopify doesn’t natively handle.
The flow: pick filters (tag, collection, vendor, inventory, date). Then you are shown matching products with a count and sample. You can choose to soft delete (set to draft), hard delete (remove permanently), or hard delete with auto-redirects to a target URL. You can schedule the operation for a future date. You can also optionally pair a “set back to active” job for the soft deleted items. This solves the seasonal-restore problem in one configuration step.
What’s good: the preview for this operation shows what you’re doing won’t blow up anything critical, requires a confirm, a redirect option is imported automatically, and scheduled delete operations can affect both products now. What’s not so good: the target for a single redirect operation is a single URL, so you can’t do different redirects for different products (you still have to use the redirect generator for those kinds of things). We are on the roadmap to have template based redirects for this operation.
Best for: seasonal stores, store cleanups, app stack refreshes, anyone with 100+ products to delete who has SEO traffic to protect.
2. Bulk Product Edit by Hextom
Hextom Bulk Product Edit – The most installed bulk editor on the App Store and it does include a delete action. The filters are decent. The preview exists. The pricing is fair (free tier for small jobs). For a one-time hard purge it is fine.
Notes: 6 of 10, Where it falls short: no built-in redirect creation, no scheduled un-delete, soft delete is just a status change you have to set up as a separate edit task. For a seasonal use case that means three operations instead of one, and you still have to handle redirects in a different tool. It works, but the seams show.
Best for: merchants who already use Hextom for other bulk edits on the store and would only use this product to hard delete products with no need to recover any of those products through SEO. Worst for: seasonal product cycles or product migrations where the majority of products would need to be redirected to new locations.
3. Matrixify
Matrixify allows you to delete products via an Excel import. I exported a list of products, put a “Command” column with “DELETE” in it and re-imported them. It worked, but it was completely over the top for what I was trying to do. The spreadsheet round-trip made the process long and was full of opportunities to accidentally delete something I didn’t mean to. Due to the way I sorted the sheet, there was a decent chance that I could delete the wrong row by accident.
Useful, but if you already use Matrixify for updates then this would be better to use to do a delete tied into a larger data sync. It doesn’t handle redirects in the same function, so you’ll need to do those separately.
Best for: Matrixify power users running multi-step bulk operations.
4. Shopify native bulk actions
Yes Shopify does allow for bulk actions. On the products page in the Shopify admin for example, you can select up to 50 products at a time and then delete all of them with a single click. In fact, the bulk delete feature within the native Shopify admin is perfect just the way it is. All you do is check the box next to each product and then choose Delete from the bulk actions dropdown menu. Simple enough. But remember, only up to 50 products can be deleted at one time.
For a few hundred products that’s many rounds of click-select-confirm. Doable. But there is no preview that survives a page reload, no redirect creation, no soft-delete-with-schedule. You also only get to use the most basic filter options on the products list. If you’re doing native for small delete one and don’t mind doing it quickly, it’s totally fine. Anything bigger, just install something that can handle it for you.
Side by side
| App | Filters | Soft delete | Redirects | Schedule |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CS Bulk Delete Products | Full | Yes | Built-in | Yes (both directions) |
| Hextom Bulk Product Edit | Full | Workaround | No | Limited |
| Matrixify | Via spreadsheet | Workaround | No | Manual |
| Shopify native | Basic | Manual | No | No |
A rant about delete-and-pray
Almost every store cleanup tutorial I see misses a critical step: the redirect. I spent 18 months building traffic to individual product pages and I wouldn’t dream of deleting a page without a redirect for it. It doesn’t cost anything to do it right and it could cost you a year of lost traffic if you don’t. It’s pretty simple: if you had a page at http://store.site.com/product and you delete the product, that URL now resolves to “A page was not found” instead of http://store.site.com/newproduct. That’s not cleanup. That’s arson. Don’t do it.
End rant. Use redirects. Always.
Before you delete
Things you should know before you delete your store products: 3 Steps. Three prep steps. One: run a URL audit using the URL analyzer to check for any slugs with inbound link signals that you might want to preserve instead of deleting the products altogether. Two: Before deleting products, export those products as a backup and then import them back into the store using the CSV import guide which doubles as a reference for how to export products as well. Three: If you are undertaking a full-on app stack cleanup, refer to the app stack audit to make sure you aren’t cleaning up something that is contributing to store bloat that you haven’t noticed. Also, make sure you review your store policies while deleting products and clean out any unused Shopify plans that may not align with where your store is heading. Check out the 2026 plan guide to determine if you’re on the right Shopify plan for your store.
FAQ
What is the best Shopify bulk delete products app in 2026?
Use for Tempory seasonal stores or clean out operations where you want to safely delete products with reverse delete, restore, and 301 server redirects included. For operations where SEO is not a concern use Hextom Bulk Product Edit to permanently delete products. (Free alternative)
Can Shopify delete products in bulk natively?
It only allows 50 at a time from the products list page, does not create redirects and you can’t preview to see if it’s correct that it instantly displays. For more than 100 products you should use the dedicated app.
What is soft delete and why does it matter?
Soft delete: This feature allows to set a product to “draft” instead of deleting it. That product will no longer be visible online, but it, and all of its photos, variants, and metafields will still be stored in the database. A great feature for products you have for a seasonal event that you want to bring back out next year.
Do I need to set up redirects when I delete products?
If you had organic traffic or backlinks to the product. A 301 redirect from the old product page URL to the parent collection URL will preserve most of the SEO value for the site. Skipping the redirect would cause a 404 error and lose the link equity.
Can I schedule a bulk delete to run at a future date?
Yes, you can also schedule a paired restore with CS Bulk Delete Products, which makes dealing with seasonal cycles pretty easy in one shot.
Is there a way to undo a bulk delete?
Hard deleted files are permanently deleted on the Shopify side and there is no undo. You will want to make sure that you have a good preview feature as well as a soft delete option on the to be safe. Use both of these features whenever possible, and always hard delete when you are certain that you want to get rid of a file.
