404 When Configurable Product set to 'Not Visible Individually'

Question

I've got a bit of a problem. I have some products which are bound together using a configurable product but I don't want the actual configurable product to be shown.

For example, a rose comes in red and yellow colours. Both of these are part of the Single Rose configurable product.

I want the visibility of both simple products to remain, however the configurable itself I wish would not show in the catalog or search results.

This does work fine however when I set the configurable to 'Not Visible Individually', the simple products then throw a 404 error even though they still appear in the catalog and the click is made organically. If I set the configurable to Visible then all the simple ones work too.

While the configurable product is set to Not Visible, the configurable product will still work fine which is odd. Of course it does mean you have to access it through direct link. But the simples wont work with click or direct link (simples are always 'Visible').

Is this normal behaviour for Magento 2? I have a Magento 1 site too and the above is no issue there.

If its normal behaviour, is there any way get around it and hid certain configurables from being shown?

Answer 1

Here you can change Simple Products visibility to Catalog, Search and Enable product if not. After that disable Configurable Product From Backend.

Still, If you face the same issue then run indexing and check Simple Products in your storefront.

Indexing Command: php bin\magento indexer:reindex