1. Contents
  2. Reference
  3. Channels and tasks
  4. Shopify
  5. Collections Upload

Collections Upload

The task creates your categories as collections in the Shopify shop. It runs before Products Upload, because into the shop a product carries only the reference to its collection, not the collection itself.

What gets transferred

For each category in TRADElube a collection is created in the shop, with name, description and the two entries for search engines.

Which categories these are is decided by the field Root Category on the channel: without an entry the whole tree goes, with one only the subtree below it. There is no selection beyond that, this task knows no condition.

The tree itself does not go along. Shopify puts all collections on one level, in full under Shopify.

A category deleted in TRADElube is deleted in the shop. That is the reverse and cannot be set: where a collection belongs to this one category only, it would otherwise stay behind as a dead entry.

How the transfer plan is built

One plan with a single section, so no tab bar sits above the assignments. It carries four rows:

Assignment What goes into it
Title The collection's name in the shop, mandatory
Description Html The description text the shop shows above the product list
Meta Title The title for search engines
Meta Description The description text for search engines

Title has two kinds of source, and choosing between them is this plan's only decision. The category's name is the obvious one. The category path puts the names of the categories above it in front, separated by slashes. Because collections sit side by side in the shop, the path is the only way there to tell two subcategories of the same name apart.

You pick the language per assignment, not per tab. The plan has no tab bar for language versions. Instead the sources carry the language in their name, for instance Name [Deutsch]. So what goes into the shop is the one language version you set there.

Special features and limits

A collection already present in the shop is taken over rather than duplicated. TRADElube first looks there for a collection with the same title and remembers it as a channel mapping before creating a new one. So you can connect a shop that already holds collections, as long as their names match your categories.

Categories above run before the ones below them. For the shop that makes no difference, because it does not know the nesting. For the execution it does, because TRADElube works the tree from the top down and only picks up a category's children once that category is through.

A collection carries no image. TRADElube keeps no image on a category, so there is nothing to transfer.

This task creates collections whose products are assigned to them by Products Upload. Beside those Shopify knows the automated collection, which fetches its products itself through a condition, on the product type or a tag for instance. Whoever sets the shop up that way does not need this task: the collection is then created in Shopify, and TRADElube only supplies the fields its condition works on. Both at once is the one case that goes wrong, because then two sides decide the same content.

Further reading