This is a just a quickie – got caught out with a weird issue yesterday where the Magento products in a particular category just disappeared – they still existed if you navigated directly to their URL, but they would not show in their categories (though the Manage Categories screen in the Magento admin still showed those products in their correct category).
These things always happen at inopportune times, I was right about to start a pre-go-live review of a site, and was left with one category completely devoid of products, thanks for making me look like an egg, Magento!
It prompted me to begin a sequence of steps I have found myself often taking to diagnose why products do not appear on the Magento frontend like I expect them to. I thought it might be worth documenting those steps I take and things I check to find out what is preventing a product to show up. Ironically yesterday, I got to the end of my usual list and the products still didn’t show up! So I now have one other thing to suggest you try when products appear to inexplicably stop displaying.
Here we go with my top things to check for when your products don’t show up:
Are the products In Stock?
I know it sounds obvious but when you’re adding a quick test product, it’s easy to miss this field, trust me. Make sure it’s set to In Stock as shown below:
You can also set up the inventory configuration to Display out of stock products, which sort of negates this one if it is set to Yes:
Are the products Enabled?
Again another easy one to miss when adding a product manually, not so easy to stuff up if you use bulk product imports though. Interestingly the fix I eventually found below involved this attribute.
Are the products Visible?
In some merchandising situations you want your simple products to be invisible and only show the parent products. However if you do want your product to be visible make sure you set it where applicable in this field.
Are any associated products in stock?
If you have a complex product like a bundled or configurable product, at least one of the simple products that comprise it must be in stock and enabled (almost a bit of a recursion on this list, eh?!). A well behaved configurable will have an associated products tab that looks a bit like this:
Are the products in the expected category?
More of a sanity check than anything, but the individual product should be reporting it belongs to the correct category like this:
Are your Caches and Indexes out of date?
It never hurts to clear/reindex these when you’re scratching your head, it’s getting pretty desperate if you’re still with me to here!
Access these options in the System -> Cache Management and System -> Index Management menus.
Have you run out of other things to try?
And lastly – the weird situation I had yesterday where the products were visible when navigating directly, but not when looking at their category page (and oddly it only affected one category). I suspect this must be to do with an index table not being correct, or a cache, but I tried re-indexing and refreshing the cache to no avail, so I can’t pin it on this for sure.
Anyway, all it took to have the products re-associate with their category was to bulk disable them and then bulk re-enable them. Strange eh? I had tested a bulk attribute change earlier and that didn’t fix them, so it wasn’t just any attribute change, but particularly the status. I just wish I knew why that fixed them – but I didn’t have time to investigate further, or even try to replicate the issue. So for now It’s a ‘solar flare’ problem…
Got through all of these and still no luck? Let me know. Also I’d appreciate any feedback on other tips or suggestions people may have on this, always good to add another possible fix to my list.
thanks……………………….
thank u very much ..
ur solution is really great……….
Although magento is a powerful piece of e commerce software, it is pretty stupid at times.
Disabling and enabling products fixed my problem of products not showing up
Thanks a lot. 🙂
Checking if the product was in stock solved my problem.
Thanks a lot !
Thanks for the write up! I’ve been tearing my hair out completely (well, what’s left of it) trying to figure out why the heck things weren’t showing up in my ebook category! GRAR!
Before reading your (very) indepth article I tried most of what you said. I didn’t know that the indexes and caches could be redone though. I way really hoping that would clear things up, buy sadly it didn’t.
Though I did finally find a solution, if anyone is interested. It’s a little $5 plugin which cleared everything right up for me. woot!
It’s at: http://shop.masteringmagento.com/products/catalog-visibility (not an affiliate link)
hope it solves the issue for you like it did for me (after hours and hours of trying to figure it out).
Found this article and my problem was the very first step! FML.
Thanks for the articles. Just found your site and will bookmark/subscribe.
Here also the first option solved it
Perfect the steps are very helpful
Lifesaver. Just spent a couple of bemused hours trying to work out why products were not displaying. ‘Out of stock’ was the embarassingly simple answer.
nice write up, but none of the tips helped me. Instead I overlooked something very simple: the newly created category was set to display static blocks only instead of products! maybe someone else doesn’t think about something this obvious, like me…
New to magento on an emergency basis… Stock availablity – maybe obvious if you are familiar with Magento admin… thanks a ton for the writeup! saved me countless more hours of hair pulling (2 installs and too much code monkeying)
Wow, I was about to jump out thru the window because my products were not showing up. I’ll wait for another issue (hope you had written about that too! 😉
You should open a suicide hotline! I fiinally set up my first Magento site, added my first new product, and everything went kablooey! Your bulk disable/enable technique did the trick. Thank you!
That was amazing! I just spent hours meticulously going through all my product/attribute fields trying to work out what I’d done wrong. Turns out when I disabled them and then enabled them again… hey presto… They’re showing up now. Thanks a heap.
Man, thank you very much!
The weird last step helped me very well!!
Strange bug, isn’t it?
😉
Happy Chrismas!
My God.i have had tried everything except this last one before reading this…got my problem solved..very well done!
Hi
The Magento Connect extension disappearance issue is really annoying but there is a quick fix: log in to your account, go to your extensions section, disable your extension and then enable it back which will make the extension again visible rather than to wait for the Magento Connnect system to refresh itself.
Wow, it did fixed my problem. Thanks.
Thanks a alot, it helped!
This was a godsend – thanks for the post! I shared it on a magento forum post already.
Thanks Ashley for addressing this issue. Just to add to Ashley’s tips before reindexing go to /var/locks/ and delete all the .lock files.
The steps I took to fix a similar issue is as follows:
1). Disassociate products from the Categories
2). Go to /var/locks/ and delete all the lock files
3). Reindex the tables
4). Re-associate products to the Categories
5). Go to /var/locks/ and delete all the lock files
6). Reindex for the last time!
And pray that it works!.
One more tip:
Q. Is the product assigned / enabled to the correct Website ?
In ‘Manage Products’ tick the product, then on right hand side Actions / Update Attributes (Submit)
On Websites tab on left, enable / disable from appropriate site
Do it in bulk if that is applicable.
I have also been using the handy $5 tool that @Piotr Krzyzek mentioned and it is a lifesaver.
Thanks! I’m new to magento and your tips worked.
Hello everyone,
I installed Magento (ver. 1.5.0.1) and it worked for a month but now when I press on products gives me the error message.
I have already emptied the cache and reindex but unfortunately the site does not work.
Yesterday I changed the name to the main page from “Home page” to “Sabrinacretions Megastore” but today I reinsert the name “Home page”.
I also launched the attachment in the root to export the products to a price comparison site
Maybe is this change that created the error?
Can anyone help me? red face
The problem is visible in this link pressing on products.
http://www.sabrinacreations.it
thanks
Sabrinacretions
We had been carrying out modifications to products on our sites, however the changes were not taking place on the physical websites. The reason, quite simple we had been modifying products under the wrong store front. So, as another potential tip for products not appearing – check you are making amendments in the correct store. ie. default or website or Store etc.
Magento ver 1.4.11
I tried pretty much all the steps above but still no luck.
The first time I did a configurable product, it showed up on the page with a dropdown list of my 3 simple products but then when I was trying to reproduce it with proper names. It’s not showing up anymore.
After that, I fresh installed magento just to see if there is any mistake I made during creating the configurable product, but apparently not.
I’m out of solutions at this point, hope to see if there is anyone ran into the same situation before.
Thanks
Did the same things today – thanks for the disable/enable suggestion – I hadn’t thought of that
thanks!
There is also one thing to check!
After a huge import, no products were visible on the production server, and all the verification on the checklist above were done.
However on the staging server with the same import, the products were visible.
In the import we did not specify value for the “product_websites” field. This worked fine on the staging server because there was only one STORE VIEW, but on the production server there was multiple (for the localization).
The fix has been done in the import by specifying that field during the import.
Also, when you have multiple store view, there is a new tab that appears on the left menu in the product edit form, in the backend: WEBSITES.
You have to always make sure the website box is checked.
*using Magento 1.5.1
Thank you very much for this post. Your very last solution of changing the status back and forth is what did the trick. This was an issue on a list of All Products we created, when for some crazy reason only 380 of the 500 products would show on the list. After I started disabling and enabling the missing guys they magically appeared. Yipee!
thanxxx !!!
Thank you very much………..
Really You are great………….
Hah, thanks a bunch 🙂 I forgot the damned In Stock option >.<
Sorted out my problem, thank you Ashley 🙂
Thank you!!! We changed information in our configuration->design->Miscellaneous HTML and all our products “disappeared.” I still don’t know the “why” or “how” to this problem, but disabling/enabling all the products did the trick. If you ever have the time, I’m interested in reading an article explaining this ‘solar flare’ problem.
Hi Ashley,
Your post has been a great help! I’m wondering if you have pin down the reason why the products would disappear sometimes. My problem is that I would import products via the Magento import function in the admin panel. The products would then show up fine at first on the front-end. Then after a few days, they would suddenly disappear. They are there if you navigate to their URLs, but they will not show up if you navigate through the category menu. If you know why this is happening, it would be a great help for me.
Thanks!
Hi Ashley,
Thank you for this post, I went through all the steps to double check and then I saw that last bit about disabling. I had to disable the product/s and then re-enable it for it to appear. Magento’s quirks can quickly send you around the bend! Would you happen to know how to import images once they’ve been uploaded into the /media/import folder?
Thank you again!
Jo
Hi
I have created multiple store views for multiple languages, and my products were not showing up, only in the default view. I have disabled and enabled the products and they showed up. I have to remark, that i have added the new store views AFTER i added the products, so probably the new store views didn’t know about the old products. It works fine now 🙂 Thanks for the hint, it got me on the right path!
Thanks for the article.
In my case some of the products were not showing up on front end and others were. Issue was i have same products assigned to 2 different stores. Though the products were enabled at the default level, they were disabled at the store level.
For me, the problem is due to some product not generated in flat catalog product. I don’t know why some product is not in there. I tried reindexing and recacheing many time to rebuild the catalog but the product is just not being created in the flat catalog. Do you have any idea Aschroder?
Thanks for the eye-opener! This time my problem was out of your checklist’s scope – however I know one day it will come in handy, so I bookmarked it anyway. In the mean time I wrote in my blog about yet another reason why my new configurable product won’t show up on my category page. Magento is the new quiet murderer – taking the lead from heart-diseases!!
Thank you very much for this page.
My products were set as “not available”
Manage Products – Website Tab and check the box for which website you want the product to show up on fixed it for me (why that isn’t enabled by default with only one website in the store I don’t know..)
Hi, thanks a lot for this, of course the solution turned out to be the last one 😉 But this saved me a lot of time.
Nothing working for me. Anymore. I’ve made some changes that required to empty the cache and the first 2 times during those edits, changing the status of products and re-indexing helped. Now, nothing seems to make the products show up in the category page anymore. A search for the products turns out proper results, just the category page has n products. Does anybody have other ideas? 🙁
Thank you for your help, this was a very helpfull well laid out help.
Regards Scott
I am very thankful to you.
For when all else fails -this does the trick for upgrades from 1.3x
http://www.learnmagento.org/magento-bug-fixes/there-are-no-products-matching-the-selection-magento-fix/
First i use all step above. But product not show in frontpage and i add this code {{block type=”catalog/product_list” category_id=”999″ template=”catalog/product/list.phtml”}} CMS>Pages>Home. It work fine. 🙂
Wise words. They should be carved in stone and judiciously read before any demo.
Was pulling my hair out… followed all these steps and still nothing. Finally figured out that one other thing to check is whether the correct store is checked!