Repair product data: Delete products that are not assigned to a category

Do you also know the phenomenon of "ghost articles"?

You enter a search term in your own online shop and suddenly stumble across a product that you had actually deleted long ago. Sometimes there are even products without a name. Or the price and picture are wrong.

In extreme cases (we've already had this happen), a consumer buys a product with the name and photo of a high-end product for the price of an accessory and is happy as a clam.

How does something like this happen?

Usually by importing CSV files or Excel tables that do not correspond to the shop export. For example, with products that have not been assigned to a category ID.

How do you notice such ghost articles?

In everyday life: by chance, as described above: through your own searches or through a customer purchase. As a rule, one percent of the affected articles are found in this way.

How do you fix products without a link?

Usually: manually, in a whole stack of database tables. Each article has to be determined individually and then deleted in several tables.

Or: with the help of this script :-)
It shows you which products are "unused", i.e. not assigned to any category. As a rule, these are ghost products. If the product has no name, we show you the product ID instead. You can click on each result to get to the product and check it.
You can tick and delete each product individually in the list or tick and delete everything in one go with a single mouse click.