The Invisible Ones: What to Do When Magento Products (Categories, Images) Don’t Show Up

In the chart of the most frustrating Magento issues this one would definitely hit the top.

So, if you’ve ever spent hours or days trying to figure out why your freshly-imported products, categories or images never appeared on your frontend / backend, here’s to you and your destroyed nerve cells. If you're struggling with this issue at the moment, cheer up! These are a couple of tips from atomni.com that will help you if...

… your newly added categories or products don’t show up on the frontend

There are several issue that could be at hand.
While in the Product editing section (Catalog->Manage Products, and select a product):

1. Make sure all of the products you want to display are in categories

2. On the Inventory Tab, The quantity in stock has to be greater than the ‘out of stock’ minimum quantity, The item has to be marked ‘In-Stock’

3. On the General Tab, The product’s status has to be set to ‘Enabled’ and the visibility has to be set to ‘Catalog’ or ‘Catalog and Search’

4. Once you’ve made sure of these, go go System->Index Management and refresh the product-category indices

… product images don’t show up

If your images have been imported and are on the server but for some reason are not displayed on the frontend, do the following:

1. Make sure to recursively change the file permissions in magento/media to "777" (full read/write/exec access)

2. On the Images Tab, make sure there is at least one image uploaded for the product, that the Excluded checkbox isn’t checked, and the radios to include it for thumbnail, base image, and small image are selected for the respective images.

3. Under System->Configuration->Catalog->Product Image Placeholders, make sure there is a default image uploaded for each of the respective image types

4. Remove the .htaccess file located in the magento/media folder

5. Under System->Cache Management, flush the catalogs image cache.

Navigate to the front-end of your Magento install, and you should see your products with images in the product catalog.

Source: atomni.com

Hopefully one of these tips will save you from the usual aches and pains of product import to Magento. Follow us to get more useful materials on online business management.