Discontinued Products

PromoSync tracks each product’s lifecycle status at the supplier and stores it on the product’s psrestful.status metafield. For stores that opt in, a daily check keeps that value current, and PromoSync uses it to stop wasting updates on products that are no longer available.

Product Status Values

Every synced product carries one of four statuses:

When the psrestful.status metafield is missing, PromoSync treats the product as active.

See the product metafield reference for the raw field details.

How Status Is Detected

Discontinued handling is opt in per store. When Enable Discontinued Handling is turned on, PromoSync runs an automatic status check once a day for that store:

1. It reads the current status for each of the store’s synced products directly from PromoStandards (via PSRESTful).
2. Whenever the status differs from what is stored in Shopify, PromoSync writes the new value to the psrestful.status metafield.

Stores that leave this setting off are skipped entirely, so they spend no extra API calls on the daily check.

The check only looks at products that have been synced into PromoSync. Products that exist in your Shopify store but were never imported or linked through PromoSync are not part of this process (this is the same scope used by the inventory and price syncs).

Enabling Discontinued Handling

1. Go to Settings.
2. Turn on Enable Discontinued Handling.
3. Click Save.

What Happens to Discontinued Products

Once a product’s status is discontinued, PromoSync stops updating it:

This prevents discontinued items from being reset to stale or zero values, and it keeps sync runs focused on products that are still for sale. The product itself is not deleted or hidden; you stay in control of whether to keep selling, archive, or remove it.

Discontinued Title Prefix

You can also have PromoSync visually flag discontinued products by adding a prefix to their title. This is a sub-option of discontinued handling: it only takes effect when Enable Discontinued Handling is on.

When Prefix Discontinued Titles is enabled:

• When a product becomes discontinued, PromoSync prepends Discontinued - to its Shopify title (for example, Clean Up Cap becomes Discontinued - Clean Up Cap).
• If that product later returns to a non-discontinued status, the Discontinued - prefix is removed automatically.

This setting is off by default and only controls the title prefix. Turning it off (while discontinued handling stays on) keeps the status detection and the inventory/price skip behavior, just without changing titles.

Enabling the Title Prefix

1. Go to Settings.
2. Make sure Enable Discontinued Handling is on.
3. Turn on Prefix Discontinued Titles.
4. Click Save.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are only some of my products being checked? PromoSync only checks products that are synced into PromoSync. If your Shopify store has more products than were checked, the extra products are not linked to PromoSync and are therefore outside the status check, the inventory sync, and the price sync.

Will a discontinued product be deleted from my store? No. PromoSync only stops updating it and (optionally) prefixes its title. Removing or archiving the product is your decision.

What if a discontinued product becomes available again? On the next status check PromoSync updates the psrestful.status metafield back to its new value, resumes inventory and price updates, and removes the Discontinued - title prefix if the prefix setting is enabled.