Mass delete products in Magento

If you have a BIG catalogue - you soon find out that management via the admin can just become tedious. We performed a product import of 80,000 products which unfortunately was supplied with inaccurate information.

Because of the complexity of the products and sheer volume of attributes- it is quicker to delete then reimport. But deleting via the admin for 80k products is nigh on impossible.

The easiest way to pull this off is by means of a quick script. The key to this script is that the indexing functionality is disabled entirely for the process, then enabled again at the end - requiring a manual update at the end, or you could code in an index refresh using our article on refreshing catalogue indexes using a php script.

<?php
ob_end_flush();
echo "Started " . date("d/m/y h:i:s") . "rn";
define('MAGENTO', "/domains/example.com/http");
require_once MAGENTO . '/app/Mage.php';
umask(0);
Mage::app()->setCurrentStore(Mage_Core_Model_App::ADMIN_STORE_ID);
$products = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->getCollection()->addFieldToFilter('data_set', 1544);
$sql = "";
$undoSql = "";

for ($i = 0; $i <= 8; $i++) {
    $sql.= "UPDATE index_process SET mode = 'manual' WHERE index_process.process_id =$i LIMIT 1;";
    $undoSql.= "UPDATE index_process SET mode = 'real_time' WHERE index_process.process_id =$i LIMIT 1;";
}

$mysqli = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource')->getConnection('core_write');
$mysqli->query($sql);
$total_products = count($products);
$count = 0;

foreach($products as $product) {
    $product->delete();
    if ($count++ % 100 == 0) {
        $cur = strtotime(date("d/m/y h:i:s")) - $time;
        $time = strtotime(date("d/m/y h:i:s"));
        echo round((($count / $total_products) * 100) , 2) . "% deleted ($count/$total_products) " . round(100 / $cur) . " p/s " . date("h:i:s") . "rn";
        flush();
    }
}

echo "Ended " . date("d/m/y h:i:s") . "rn";
$mysqli->query($undoSql);
exit();

In our case, we filtered the type of products by its "Data Set" - an attribute assigned to that batch of products, but you can change this to suit any means of filtering.

The above script runs at around 25 products deleted per second.