Most of the time the right way to retire a product is to deactivate it, which hides it from sales and product lists while keeping all of its history intact. But if you have just added a product by mistake, and nothing in your shop has ever used it, you can delete it outright and free up its SKU.

Go to Inventory > Products, open the product, and scroll to the Danger Zone at the bottom of the page.

If the product has never been used you get a Delete Forever button. Deleting is permanent and cannot be undone. The SKU becomes available again for a new product.

A product counts as never used only when all of the following are true

  • It has never been on an invoice or an estimate, including voided ones
  • It has never been on a purchase order
  • It is not part of a package
  • It has no serial numbers on file
  • It has never appeared in a physical count, including as a scan
  • It has never been returned
  • It has never had a stock adjustment, and has no units on hand
  • It was typed in by hand rather than brought in by a data import

If any of those is not true, the Danger Zone tells you exactly what is blocking it, for example "It's on 3 invoice or estimate lines, 12 units in stock." In place of the delete button you get a Deactivate button, which hides the product from invoice and purchase order search and from the default Products list without touching its history. You can find it again later by setting the Status filter on the Products list to Inactive or All Statuses.

Products that came in through a data import can only be deactivated, never deleted, because deleting one would break any future import that has to match against it.

Who can do this: permanently deleting a product requires the "Permanently delete never-used products" permission, which owners and store managers have by default. You can grant it to other users at Managers > Permissions. Deactivating a product requires the "Create & edit products" permission instead.

Every permanent delete is written to the activity log with the SKU and product name. Once the product row is gone, that log entry is the only record it ever existed.