Importing product visibility changes selection on backend but changes don't place on front end

Question

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

I'm importing visibility changes for a bunch of products so they aren't visible in search results (visibility = 2). That changes the product visibility to "Catalog". The CSV is accepted and when I look in the products, the change took place. However, the products still show up in the search. After I go in the product and simply click "Save" (without changing the visibility setting which was changed by the CSV), the update finally works. Any ideas on how to avoid having to go into each product just to simply hit "save"? The CSV changes the setting but they don't take effect until I go in and hit save.

Thanks again!

Answer 1

2 steps you should do when you change catalog (products) data:

1. Reindex (backend > system > index management, or with the commandline "php shell/indexer.php"
2. Clear cache (backend > system > cache management)

The reindex takes the data from the EAV tables and put them in a flat table for speed. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%93value_model) You can set the index mode on "update on save". But when you import a lot of product i would recommend on putting it on manual mode and reindex afterwards. Else the import will be significantly slower.

Magento stores data it fetches from the database in it's cache so you need to clean the cache afterwards.