A stub product is a product with only minimal information that gets created in Magento by ChannelUnity when an order is imported from a marketplace into Magento. Specifically this originates from a product SKU that exists only in the marketplace (e.g. Amazon Seller Central) and not in Magento.

There are different reasons to why you could have this, e.g.:
– a product was added manually to Amazon Seller Central or eBay
– the SKU name or mapping was changed in ChannelUnity

When changing the SKU value or SKU mapping, Amazon/eBay will see the SKU as a new product and create it. This means you are left with two versions of your product, the old and the new SKU.

When you receive an order in Seller Central, ChannelUnity will import the details from Seller Central, but will not be able to match this up with your shopping cart. To allow the order to be imported, it will create the product in Magento as a stub.

How do I know?

Typically spotting something along the lines of “Product missing from imported order ID 026-5590606-5937135” in an Order or Product in Magento, would indicate that ChannelUnity could not find the product in Magento, so it imported the details from the order and created a product with that SKU in Magento.

What to do

This depends on your specific requirements.

– You can remove the product from Magento and remove the listing from Amazon if the stub product should not exist.

– If the product should exist in Magento, then you can add additional details in Magento, then enable the product for listing in ChannelUnity.

– To prevent stub products from being created at all, please see the following steps.

Prevent ChannelUnity creating stub products in Magento

The default behaviour of the ChannelUnity connector module for Magento is to create a product in Magento when an order is received containing a SKU that doesn’t exist in Magento (according to the SKU mapping).

This article describes how to stop this from happening.

Please be aware however that if an order is received from a marketplace into Magento, but the SKU on the order doesn’t exist in Magento, then the order will not be able to be created.

Steps [Magento 1]

Locate the following code file: /app/code/community/Camiloo/Channelunity/Model/Orders.php

In this file you will find the following code.

private function createStubProduct($missingSku, $productTitle, $websiteID, $keyorder, $price, $qty, $skuAttribute)
{
    $product = new Mage_Catalog_Model_Product();
    ...
    $product->save();
}

Replace this function so that it looks like the following:

private function createStubProduct($missingSku, $productTitle, $websiteID, $keyorder, $price, $qty, $skuAttribute)
{
}

Note that the function definition stays in place but the code of the function is removed. If you may need the stub creation functionality in the future then we recommend to comment out the code rather than deleting it.

Steps [Magento 2]

Set the Allow Stub Product Creation setting to No.