Store statuses & deletion
Disabling, archiving and deleting a store — and what each takes with it.
A store that is not plainly open for business is in one of three states, and they are not interchangeable: Disabled is your own switch, Archived is the platform's, and Deleting is permanent.
Who can do this: disabling, enabling and editing a store are the Administrator's alone; deleting is an ordinary permission the Admin role also holds. All of it lives in the store's row menu on the Stores page.
Disabled — your switch, fully reversible#
Disable stops a store trading. As the dialog puts it: "This store will stop accepting orders, returns, refunds and stock changes. Everything it already holds stays visible, and you can enable it again at any time." The seat the store was using is freed the same moment — see the seat fine print for what that does and does not do to your bill.
Enable brings it back — "This store will start accepting orders, returns, refunds and stock changes again." — and takes a seat to do it. With no seat free, the store stays off until you buy one or free one.
While a store is disabled, any attempted write against it is refused with "store is disabled"; reading its history always works.
Archived — the platform's switch#
After a downgrade, stores beyond what the new plan covers are archived by the platform (after a grace period). An archived store is read-only: you cannot edit it, enable it, or delete it. It comes back only when a plan covers it again. Nothing in it is lost.
Deleting — permanent, and it takes the history#
Delete is a full teardown. Before anything happens, the dialog checks the store — "Checking what this store holds…" — and lists what goes with it: its orders, invoices, returns and refunds (in red, because they are financial records), its inventory records, its storefront including the public link, and its staff store assignments. Confirming means typing the store's name, and then: "Deleting this store is permanent and cannot be undone."
Two details worth knowing:
- A discount limited to several stores simply loses this one from its list. A discount whose only store this was is switched off entirely rather than silently becoming business-wide.
- The store's name is released and can be used again.
Delete is refused in three cases: the store is archived, a delete is already in progress, or it is your last store — "A business must keep at least one store, so this one cannot be deleted." The dialog then offers Deactivate instead.