Performing housekeeping on old products

I have a client that approached me about wanting to do some housekeeping and delete a bunch pf products they no longer sell. That raised an interesting question:

Are there any ill effects to deleting old products, instead of just unpublishing them, besides issues with pulling reports on those products? Would anything else be effected like customers looking at their old orders?

Hi,

It should not a problem.
The main information of the products are stored in the orders so that even if you delete the problem, the invoice will still display properly.
The only drawback will be that if your products have files that are to be downloaded after the purchase, these won't be available anymore.