koitaki

Thanks Moses, that’s good advice! I was actually wondering about getting in a WC “database” expert, but they seem a little harder to find than a WC expert, and perhaps a WC expert would suffice.

Ahead of that, I’ll try:
(i) going through all the tables to better understand & be more comfortable with them
(ii) try to backtrack through my CSV uploads to see if I can fully understand how this mess happened

Then hopefully I’ll be better placed to evaluate a WC expert & understand their database solution.

I’d rather be dealing with many other business issues than with this…but it does lead to enhanced knowledge of the WC database.

Hi LovingBro and respective readers!

I’ve got access to the site db now, so I can see what’s going on. Unfortunately it appears that during my intended change to make variations point to their parent IDs, instead of made up SKUs, has indeed killed off the old variations, created new duplicate products, complete with new variations (ie. with new IDs) under these new products.

This picture might help explain the issue better: https://imgur.com/jnIeDs8

Also, the newly created products don’t show variations in the Product Editor interface. They’re just blank, and showing the buttons to generate the variations.

I assume there’s no hope of getting back the old variations (ie. with their old IDs). So I’m now wondering how to clean up this shemozzle.

If I trash the old parent products that no longer have variations, that completely loses all link to past invoices, so those invoices will no longer work. We often sell products with 6yr warranty, which requires a long invoice tail.

In addition, the new products seem to be missing their variations in the Product Editor, and I’m not sure how to recover that.

Meantime, we’re showing duplicate products – some that allow the customer to buy them, and some that don’t allow the customer to buy them. Pretty nasty shopfront these days 🙁

Any suggestions on how to tackle this?

Thanks in advance folks!