Merchlint – Catalog Audit for WooCommerce

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

Twenty checks, in six 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; sale prices whose scheduled end date has passed
  and are still running; products with no price at all.
• Catalogue and navigation — products outside every category; duplicate SKUs; variable
  products with every variation sold out, or marked sold out while their variations are still in stock;
  published products WooCommerce keeps out of the shop because their parent doesn’t exist or isn’t published.
• Content — descriptions too short to answer a customer’s question; images with no alt text.
• Performance and media — oversized image files; bloated autoloaded options; media entries
  whose file is missing from disk; product photos smaller than the 500 × 500 pixels Google
  Merchant Center requires from 31 January 2027.
• Environment — PHP, WordPress or WooCommerce on a version that no longer gets security fixes;
  a scheduled-task queue that stopped running — WP-Cron and Action Scheduler are reported
  separately — which is what stalls every piece of work meant to happen later.
• Product identifiers — products with no GTIN, UPC, EAN or ISBN, and two products carrying
  the same one. An empty or duplicated identifier is the usual reason an item quietly drops out of
  a shopping feed, and nothing in WooCommerce says a word about it.

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 from report” is permanent. Seasonal stock you already know about stops coming back
  after every scan, and stays hidden across plugin updates.

Every check has a page that explains it

Twenty checks, twenty pages — linked from the audit screen, next to the rule they belong to.
Each page says what the problem costs, which fields the rule reads and which thresholds it
compares them against, how to fix it, and when the finding is not a problem in your store.

That last part is why the pages exist. A rule you cannot argue with is a rule you end up ignoring
wholesale, so every page names the cases where the right answer is “hide this and move on”:
seasonal goods, spare parts, products sold only by phone.

• All twenty checks, explained
• Why there is no “Fix it” button
• What a finished report looks like

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.

The links to merchlint.com are ordinary links. They open in your browser when you click them, and
the plugin sends nothing along the way — not your store’s address, not its version, not an
identifier of any kind. The only thing in the address is the language your admin is set to, so
that a Polish store gets the Polish page. Without a click, nothing leaves your store at all.

An AI assistant can read the audit only if you connect one to your store yourself; see the FAQ.

From the same author

Merchgain is a free profit report for WooCommerce from
the same author. This audit shows the revenue at stake; Merchgain shows how much of what you sell
you actually keep: gross profit and margin per product, category and period, from the cost of
goods field built into WooCommerce 10.3 and newer. Like Merchlint, it only reads.

If Merchgain is not installed, a short note about it appears at the very bottom of the audit
screen, below the results. “Don’t show again” hides it for good, and it never appears anywhere
else in your admin.