Delete a sales channel blocked by subscribers
Clear the subscriber block so a sales channel can be deleted, and know which channels can never be removed.
If a client tries to delete a sales channel and gets an error saying it is subscribed by orgs or business units, this is a hard block: deletion is refused whenever at least one organisation or one business unit (their own or another org's) still holds a subscription to that channel.
To clear the block, every subscribing org unsubscribes from the channel (unsubscribing removes both their org-level and all business-unit-level subscriptions at once).
To clear the block, the owner switches the channel from public to private, which immediately removes every subscriber and withdraws all pending subscription requests — after that the delete will pass the subscriber check.
When the owner of a public sales channel changes its sharing back to private, the platform does three things in one transaction: (1) all pending subscription requests on the channel are marked withdrawn with the remark 'Withdrawn because sales channel was made private from public earlier'; (2) every business-unit subscription to the channel is deleted; (3) every org-level subscription is deleted. This is immediate and affects other companies: every subscriber org loses access to the channel's catalog across all their business units the moment the switch is saved, with no notification email. Auto-approval is also turned off as part of going private. This is worth warning clients about before they toggle sharing — 'making it private for a while' silently kicks out all subscribers, and turning it public again later does NOT restore them; each org must raise a fresh subscription request and be approved again. Conversely, this behavior is the sanctioned way to clear subscribers when the owner wants to delete a channel that is blocked by existing subscriptions. If a subscriber client reports a shared catalog vanished without action on their side, check whether the owning org flipped the channel to private.
Every business org is created with three system channels: 'Default Sales Channel', 'ISN Feeder', and 'Default BU Feeder', and each business unit additionally gets its own 'Default Sales Channel' when the BU is created. These typed channels (default, ISN feeder, BU feeder types), plus the platform-wide global channels, are permanently protected: any delete attempt is rejected with a 'default sales channel cannot be deleted' error, regardless of force options. So when a client asks why they cannot remove a channel they 'never created', the answer is that it was auto-provisioned with their org or business unit and is required by the system — the Default Sales Channel is where their own inventory publishes by default, and the feeder channels are how their catalog feeds business units and the Infurnia Supply Network. They can ignore these channels or manage which SKUs/designers are mapped to them, but they cannot delete or get rid of them. Only additional channels the org created itself (untyped ones) are deletable, and those are still subject to the subscriber / designer / SKU / automation-rule checks.