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Are your Caches and Indexes out of date?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.
OMG, I set the inventory status within the Configurable product to OUT OF STOCK… how dumb to miss that. Found solution buy doing as above and allow OUT OF STOCK item to show and hey presto they did…. solved and wow what a great feeling after a day of screaming at my PC.
Hi!!
Thank you!!! very much ..Sir .you are serving humanity .
My boss was breathing on my Neck :)))) .
Thanks again
I would also add to the list, check that if you are running Multiple websites or Stores, that the Product is tick in the relevant boxes in the Product Information -> Websites tab… That’s caught me out a few times.
Ha ha, I should have read Clive’s comment. I just got caught out because one set of products didn’t import with their website. I was going to leave a comment here with his advice.
It took be a while to find the “Display out of stock products”. Go to System, Configuration. On the left click Inventory (under Catalog). Then it is in the Stock Options.
This post is still helping people almost 2 years later! I tried everything on the list to no avail but disabling and enabling the product worked like a charm!
as a beginner in learning Magento, this post is very useful. Many thanks.
Thanks, I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out why they were not displaying correctly. Is there a fix to correct this problem as its a pain having to go back through the simple products to ammend them. Thanks again.
thnaks a lot, i had been like crazy doing all kind of stuff, excelllent post.
I’ve got a single product that won’t show up… it’s really weird. Every other product we have displays just fine but this one leads to a 404 Not Found error no matter which category I select it from (it belongs in 3 or 4 different categories). It’s in stock, enabled, visible, I flushed all caches, rebuilt indexes, disabled and re-enabled it… so now I don’t know what to do. Any ideas??
What a pain it can be… but it hurts even more when I realize it’s my own dumb fault! Associated products kinda need to be filled in if its a configurable products. Thank you for your post, better than most out there, now I know what to look for!
Hello,
I have a big problem, I need to urgently restore my magento shop with all the content. Before I ruined everything I made a backup of the whole magento folder and a sql/xsv export of the database.
Now I placed the magento folder in my httpdocs as it was before, and I imported the sql dump file in the database. But when I try to open the website it doesn’t work, or sometimes the database seems to auto update with tables and only a standard magento home page comes up.
What should I do?? Thanks a lot!
All of my products were working fine until yesterday when we upgraded our PHP and added SOAP. Now our (lower) product descriptions and any configurable option will not show up. I’ve done everything. Disabled, enabled; checked status; changed categories; flush cache and index rebuild; added new products; and now nothing is working right. Any ideas left? All products show up, even configurable products in the catalog, but only config products do not display main descriptions, add to cart tabs, or configurable options.
A link to a product page is here: http://www.cewinds.com/accessories-1/saxophone-mouthpieces/saxophone-mouthpiece-silver-shocka/ss-tenor-saxophone-1/ce-winds-silver-shocka-tenor-saxophone-mouthpiece.html
Thanks man. The “Stock Availability” option was causing my product to not display.
nice article…one thing that’s missing…that i found after some hours…..don’t forget to check the website checkbox!
Thanks,
Very Helpful! My Issue was sock level @ 0 and indexes needed to be updated.
i had the exact same issue today…thank you very much for this… can some one throw some light on this .. why this happens… ?
i am using magento 1.7
wow im so Dump
Thanks so much! it fixed my problem
Many of our merchants had that problem, too. Now I use
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/netresearch-productvisibility.html, so they get an idea if the product will be visible on the frontend (or why it won’t appear).
Thanks. It worked for me. Had been struggling for past half an hour. 🙂
Ashley, thank you so much! After moving website to another server products in some categories became invisible (still accessible by direct URL). Disable them and then re-enable them helps, but what a pain – there are a lot of products to go. Is there any sql script or something like this?
Thank you again!
omg it was the elusive “in stock” option… defaults to NO!
Thank you Putnik for your reply! disabling all products and than enabling them again helped for me!
Thanks a lot for this post… it helped me out!
Please note though, that at my end the products were (simply) not added to the desired website (I have a multi-website install). That criteria is missing from the list.
I feel eggy 🙂
And in REST how to set this for all products to appear on the front end sales ?
‘qty’ => $qtd,
‘is_in_stock’ => $is_in_stock,
‘manage_stock’ => 0
Thanks for this info!…after pulling my hair out Clive Sweeting’s suggestion did it for me…I had not checked the box for ‘main website’ within product information > websites tab. Checking this for the configurable product and all of its simple products worked…doh, can’t believe I missed that!!!!
Sir, you just saved my life. Re-indexing did the job
This article was a life saver! After completing a mass product import for price changes all of my products suddenly disappeared from my website. After reviewing your check list of things I discovered that all of my products were listed as out of stock. I updated product attributes to in stock as a group and my products published back to the site. Thank you for your help!
I agree with Stephanie, a real life saver. In our case it was due to an indexes issue, which we discover when we tried to access to the Stock Availability drop-down menu.
Thanks.
Greetings from Spain.
Great article…….Really helpful………thank you very much……
Whole new experience to using magento and came across the same problem, products not showing in a search.
I imported 1700 items from a ZenCart into Magento and even though I expected items would need to be altered I didnt expect them not showing up in a search.
Solution:
Skip all the above and firstly disable all your products, clear all caches then re-enable all the products. Do a few trial searches and guess what? Works brilliantly. NOW all items related to a search string work perfectly.
Thanks for the steps, learnt something else today!
That helps alot. I would never think about disable and reenable products. Thanks.
Reindexing helped as well. I think this page would become my home page.
You saved my life! My product was out of stock… how dumb!
Im having problems with 1.7.0.2. My products are being imported via csv, but they are not being put into any categories, also they are importing as not visible. I feel like Ive tried everything!!! Any ideas? Thanks!
I deeply appreciate the tips you post! Kind regards!!
For massive products update, I’ve used this extension, just read the instructions well
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/custom-bulk-product-import-export-with-tier-pricing-product-custom-options-configurable-products-bundle-products-grouped-products-downloadable.html
Another tip!
If you are using a site in multiple languages, if the product is “Disabled” in one language and “Enabled” in the other one, it will not show up!! You have to enable it in both!
Big Thanks for that!!
Why is Magento SO HARD to use out of the box?
I’ve never come across a system more user unfriendly, how could any “normal user” get this product operations.
Packages like CubeCart cost £100, but you can be selling 5 minutes after the install ends.
Hi and well done posting the steps,
I have a client that i added loads of products to a site as an example. i added some upsells and related all looked cool on the right where the related.
Now they are not showing after they deleted one catagory? the other products in other cats where unrelated to that cat?
Yet no related now show in the right block but did before the cat delete … I’m stumped they come back if i restore the mysql to what i had the day before.
Hi Ash,
Fellow kiwi here. My issue turned out to be an issue with the store view / tick boxes on products after using the bulk enable/disable function. I’m running 1.4.1 CE.
Had to change in view then save and change in defult and it look to have stuck now ?
Nice article….solved the product related issue….thank you.
Out fo stock. That was my issue
Duh!
GL
Ashley, I was encountering this problem as well where my complex products we’re showing up in the front-end. Your comprehensive checklist was extremely helpful. When I set up my complex product I just simply forgot to assign the category. I found your list after having spent the considerable amount of time trying to get it fixed. A simple thing that I just missed. Thanks very much for putting spending time to put your your list together.
Hi, Ashley.
We’re having a related problem…only SOME products are not showing up (either in specific categories, or just some of the products, like 11 of 27) but it’s not an all-or-nothing event.
And if that weren’t weird enough, wait 15 minutes and the problem is fixed…without us doing anything (at least nothing we’re aware of).
Running heavily customized Magento EE 1.6…would appreciate any insight. Thanks.
Thanks very much. You bulk disable and re-enable suggestion did the trick (I had already tried all of the other steps you mentioned). Now, if I can just get the images to import and display properly…
I had a similar problem. Products would show in category list views, but clicking on an individual product would produce a 404 Error. I tried all of the above to no avail, but I suspected it had something to do with Magento’s url rewrites. I checked my .http access file, but it looked ok.
What finally fixed my issue was to change Use Web Server Rewrites in Config->General->Web settings to No. When I saw that it solved my issue, I turned it back to Yes and everything was still good.
I’m not sure what exactly caused the issue. I’m assuming it was a recent Magento Core update. I’ve had similar issues with url rewrites in Joomla, but this has been my first Magento site development.
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Is there a donate button ? 🙂
amazing, thank you so much… I had the issue with products that didn’t want to show up and as it seemed tried everything possible. so a couple of times I used file2cart to avoid these errors as it imports directly to database avoiding all these weird things Magento performs. I’ll try your tips, though, to fix the normal admin import.
thanks again!
I’ve done everything correctly and I double checked everything that are suggested to do here.
When I search the product, it comes up fine, when I change the show per page from 9 to 15 then
product pops up; however, the listing doesn’t show on my featured product or in the category that I put this item in.
What is going on? can anyone help me with this problem??
oh and 1more thing ..
when I switch sort by or show button to different option all the listings that I just added
also pop up… But as you know.. my customers are not aware that I have hidden listings that are only visible when you switch the sort by or show button…
please Help T.T