Description
Merchlint reads your WooCommerce catalogue and tells you where it is losing you money. Every
finding comes with the value it was based on, so you can check it yourself instead of taking our
word for it.
It changes nothing. No product, no price, no stock level, no order. The audit reads and reports;
every fix is yours to make, in your own admin.
What it looks for
Fifteen checks, in five groups:
- Money — products that sold in the past year and can no longer be bought; goods selling
without a photo or hidden from the catalogue; sales whose end date has passed and are still
running; products with no price at all. - Catalogue and navigation — products outside every category; duplicated SKUs; variable
products with every variation sold out. - Content — descriptions too short to answer a customer’s question; images with no alternative
text. - Performance and media — oversized image files; bloated autoloaded options; media entries
whose file is missing from disk. - Environment — PHP, WordPress or WooCommerce on a version that no longer gets security fixes;
a background queue that stopped running, which is what stalls scheduled work on a store.
What makes it different
- Every finding shows its evidence. Not “12 636 problems” but the field we read, the value we
found and the threshold we compared it against. - It tells you where to start. The three items with the largest amount at stake, first — before
the full list. - A zero means “checked, clean”. A rule that could not run says so instead of quietly
reporting nothing. “No data” and “no problems” are different answers, and you get the right one. - It never adds up currencies. A store selling in euros and dollars gets a separate figure for
each. Adding them without an exchange rate would be inventing a number. - Two scans of an unchanged store give the same result, item for item. When something does
change, a separate screen tells you what — and whether the difference came from your store or
from a rule of ours that got smarter. - “Hide” is permanent. Seasonal stock you already know about stops coming back after every
scan, and stays hidden across plugin updates.
Your data stays yours
The free version works entirely on your server. No account, no sign-up, no phoning home: the
plugin makes no outbound connections at all, and an automated check enforces that on every build.
Screenshots
Installation
- Install and activate the plugin. WooCommerce must be active first — WordPress enforces this for you.
- Open Store audit in the admin menu.
- Press Scan now. A store with 50 000 products takes about a minute and a half on the hardware we measure on; a slower host takes longer. You can stop the scan at any point.
The audit reads your catalogue and writes only to its own tables. Removing the plugin removes them.
Short PHP time limit? Nothing to do — the audit reads your host’s own limit and sizes each chunk to fit inside it, then books the next one itself. A shorter chunk means more of them, not less work: the audit still finishes, and it still resumes from where it stopped.
If your host reports a limit it does not actually enforce, you can set the chunk yourself in wp-config.php:
define( 'MERCHLINT_BUDGET_SECONDS', 8 );
FAQ
-
Does it change anything in my store?
-
No. It reads your catalogue and reports what it finds. Every change is made by you, in your own
admin. This is enforced in the code, not just promised: an automated check refuses to build the
plugin if it calls any function that would modify products, categories, media or orders. -
Will it slow my store down?
-
The scan runs in the background, in short slices, and it only touches the admin side. Your
storefront is not involved. If the scan is interrupted — a server restart, a deployment — it picks
up where it left off and gives the same result as an uninterrupted run. -
Can I audit a store with tens of thousands of products?
-
Yes. A scan of 50 000 products completes in about 90 seconds and the results are paginated, so
a rule with twelve thousand findings still opens instantly. -
Does it work with multilingual stores?
-
Yes. Translations of one product are counted as one product: their SKU is shared deliberately, and
their stock is one physical stock, so we never report the same goods twice or double the amount at
stake. Polylang is tested with the plugin itself; WPML is recognised through its translation table,
which we test against the same data it produces. -
Does it work with HPOS (High-Performance Order Storage)?
-
Yes, with HPOS on and off. Both modes give identical results, amounts included.
-
Some of the findings do not apply to my store.
-
Then hide them. Every rule’s page explains when the finding is NOT a problem — seasonal goods,
spare parts, products sold only by phone — and hiding is one click. The decision survives future
scans, and the hidden items stay visible as a count, so nothing disappears silently.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Merchlint” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “Merchlint” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
0.2.0
- First public release. Versions 0.1.0 and 0.1.1 below were pre-release: they were reviewed but
never published, so this is the first version you can install from the directory. Everything the
audit does is listed under 0.1.0. - Two extension points so add-ons can build on the audit: an action when a scan finishes and
a filter over the scan settings, plus the scan history behind both. - Rules the current scan did not run are now marked “not in this audit” instead of “clean”.
- A scan now keeps its settings even if an add-on hands it a value that cannot be stored — before,
one such value silently dropped every threshold the scan was running with, and the second half of
the scan used the defaults. - Comparing two audits no longer writes a PHP notice to the log when a setting holds a list rather
than a number. - No change to what the audit checks on its own.
0.1.1
- Translations now come from translate.wordpress.org instead of files bundled in the plugin.
- No change to what the audit checks or reports.
0.1.0
- First release. Fifteen checks, resumable scanning, CSV export, per-rule knowledge pages,
permanent “hide”, English and Polish.