Discontinued or seasonal product: pause or remove its reorder rule

A reorder report is built to say buy more. That is the right instinct for the two hundred products you intend to keep selling and the wrong one for the three you are winding down and the dozen that only sell between May and September. Left alone, the report keeps proposing purchase orders for all of them, because it reads the last month of sales and does not know the product has no future, or that its future starts again next spring.

Restock Ops has three controls for this, and they are not interchangeable: the rule's Enabled checkbox, the Remove button, and the Sales per day override. This post explains what each one does to the report, to draft purchase orders, and to the supplier catalog, and which one fits which situation. It assumes you already have items on the report; the per-item rules post covers how they get there.

The report only knows what you added

Restock Ops does not scan your whole catalog. The reorder report lists the variants you added through the Add products to the report search (by title, SKU or barcode), and each one carries a rule: a reorder point or a target number of days of cover, an optional manual sales rate, one supplier, and an Enabled flag. A variant that was never added is simply not there, and nothing about it is ever suggested.

That shapes the whole question. Discontinuing a product is not a matter of telling the report to stop; it is a matter of deciding what to do with one rule. There are exactly three options, and the report treats them differently.

Option one: untick Enabled

Every row on the report has an Enabled checkbox. Untick it and save, and the row stays on the report but moves to the bottom, below the items with a suggestion and below the items that are fine. Rows sort by status first (suggested, then OK, then paused) and by days of cover inside each group, so paused items sit together where they do not distract from the day's buying.

What a paused rule keeps: the reorder point, the cover target, the supplier, the manual sales rate if you set one, and the history that made the row what it is. Tick the box again in April and the seasonal item is back in the queue with the same settings, which is the point. Pausing is reversible in one click and loses nothing.

What a paused rule stops: it stops being a candidate for a draft purchase order from the report, because the Create draft PO flow takes the checked rows with a suggestion, and paused rows are not the ones you are checking. It does not stop the velocity calculation, which is just a count of sales, and it does not stop Shopify from selling the item.

• Seasonal products in the off-season. Pause in October, unpause in March, and nothing has to be set up twice.
• A product you are discontinuing but still have stock of. Pause the rule the day you decide, sell down what is left, and the report never suggests topping it up.
• A supplier problem. If a supplier has stopped shipping for a quarter and you are sourcing the item elsewhere for now, pausing keeps the original rule intact for when they are back; the same product, two suppliers post covers the longer-term version of that.

Option two: Remove from the report

The Remove button on a row deletes the rule. The row disappears, and the confirmation says exactly that: removed from the report. It is the right ending for a product that is genuinely gone, because a paused row is still a row somebody has to scroll past and, a year later, wonder about.

Remove is narrow on purpose. It deletes one reorder rule and nothing else. The supplier record and its catalog of items (your cost, MOQ, case size and supplier SKU for that variant) stay where they are, so if you ever add the product back, that information is waiting. Past purchase orders and receipts are untouched; they are history and the write log still shows what was received when. And nothing happens in Shopify: the product, its variants, its inventory and its sales history are exactly as they were.

If you want the product gone from Shopify too, that is a separate step in the Shopify admin, and the order matters a little. Archive or delete the product in Shopify after you have removed the rule, not before, so you do not leave a rule pointing at a variant that no longer exists. Shopify's product details help describes the difference between archiving, which hides a product from sales channels and keeps its history, and deleting, which does not.

Option three: override the sales rate

The Sales per day field on a row replaces the trailing average with a number you type. It exists for items whose history is a poor guide to the next few weeks, and the usual direction is up, as in the holiday ordering post. It works in the other direction too.

Suppose a product sold eight a day through a summer promotion and now sells one. The trailing 30-day average still says four, and the report suggests restocking for a demand that has ended. Typing 1 in Sales per day makes the suggestion honest immediately, without pausing the item, which you do not want to do because it still sells. The override stays until you clear it, and the row is marked so you remember it is a manual number. The stockout post describes the mirror image, where a gap in sales drags the average down and the override lifts it.

For a true wind-down, the override is a half measure: the item will still eventually reach its reorder point and the report will suggest a quantity, just a smaller one. Use it for products that are slowing, not stopping.

Which one, when

The draft PO that already exists

Deciding to drop a product often happens after the report has already put it on a draft purchase order. Neither pausing nor removing the rule touches an existing PO, because purchase orders are their own records with their own lines. Open the draft and take the line out, or, if the item was the only reason for the order, cancel the draft. A PO that is already marked ordered is a conversation with the supplier, not a button; the PO status post walks through what each status allows.

The same applies in reverse. Re-enabling a seasonal rule in spring does not recreate last year's order. It puts the item back in the queue, and the next time you run the create draft PO flow it is a candidate again, with this year's on hand, incoming and sales rate.

A short routine for the end of a season

1. Open the reorder report and sort out which rows are seasonal. If you tag seasonal products in Shopify, the product titles make this quick; if not, a one-time list in a spreadsheet pays for itself every autumn.
2. Untick Enabled on each seasonal row and save. Check they have dropped to the bottom of the report.
3. For products that sell year-round but drop sharply after the season, type a realistic Sales per day instead of pausing.
4. Open the Purchase orders list, filter to drafts, and remove any lines for the items you just paused.
5. Put a reminder in the calendar for the week before next season to tick the rules back on. The report will not remind you; the rules will simply be waiting.

What this does not do

None of these controls change anything in Shopify. Pausing a rule does not stop sales, hide the product, or alter inventory; removing a rule does not archive the product. Restock Ops keeps Shopify as the source of truth for quantities and limits itself to the planning layer, which is also why the uninstall post is short. If a product should stop being sold, that decision is made in the Shopify admin. The report's job is to stop asking you to buy it, and one checkbox does that.

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