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  2. Reference
  3. Channels and tasks
  4. Shopify
  5. Products Upload

Products Upload

The task writes your products into the Shopify shop, with descriptions, prices, references to the images already uploaded, collection assignments and metafields. It is the channel's largest, and the one whose transfer plan you will touch in any case: the Options section is empty out of the box, and without it no variant can be picked in the shop.

What gets transferred

Shopify builds a product from two levels: the product itself, carrying name, description and images, and its variants, which price, article number and weight hang on. Even an article without variants has exactly one there. The task follows that construction with one transfer plan per level.

So a parent article and its variants go over together, in one go. In TRADElube they sit side by side as records of their own. In the shop one product with several variants comes out of them.

The tasks whose results this one builds on run first: Collections Upload and Media Upload. The reason is the same as everywhere: into the shop the product carries only the reference, not the image and not the collection.

Stock does not go along. That is what Stocks Upload is for, because stock changes far more often than a product does.

How the transfer plan is built

The task has two plans, Product and Product Variant, and above them sits the tab bar that switches between them. Below it lies the second tab bar with the sections.

Transfer plan of the products upload task with the bar for the two plans, the section bar below it and the Common section open

Section What sits in it In the plan Product Variant
Selection Which products go into the shop at all and how TRADElube recognizes one already present there same
Common The fields on the product itself: Status, Title, Vendor, Description Html and the two entries for search engines absent, in Shopify these fields exist on the product only
Details The fields on the variant: SKU as a mandatory assignment, Barcode, stock keeping, weight same, plus the choice between Assignment like Product and Individual
Media The references to the images carries the cover only, recognizable by the addition Cover Only
Prices The price the product carries in the shop, and the compare price beside it same, plus the same choice as on Details
Meta Fields Your properties in the shop's metafields, one tab per property absent, metafields hang on the product
Collections The collections the product is meant to sit in inside the shop absent, a variant sits in its product's collections
Options The axes a customer picks a variant along in the shop only here, see below

The addition Default Product Only on the Details section of the plan Product means exactly that: these fields only take effect on an article without variants, because the shop creates its single variant itself. For a parent article with variants the same sits in the second plan.

One section is empty out of the box, namely Options, and it decides the variant structure in the shop. An execution without it creates all products without error, and still the shop's configurator has nothing to offer. It is not pre-filled because TRADElube cannot know which of your properties is meant to be an axis in the shop and which stays a feature on the product. That decision is yours, and it comes out differently per shop.

Each property gets its own tab inside the section. Only mapped properties are on offer: whatever has no option name facing it in the channel's Options tab does not appear here in the first place. So where one is missing, it is missing from the mapping, not from the plan.

Such a tab carries three rows. Option Name is the axis's name in the shop and comes from the mapping, Option Value the value on the individual product, and Default Value takes effect where a variant has nothing on that axis.

The two sections Details and Prices carry a drop-down above their assignments in the plan Product Variant, and that is where the decision sits which distinguishes this plan from a mere repetition. Assignment like Product takes over what you set in the first plan, for every variant. Individual makes the section one of its own. The first path is the usual one: whether the SKU comes from the product number you decide once and not twice.

Selection determines which products go into the shop and when one is removed from it again. In the row Existing Item you set how TRADElube recognizes a product already present in the shop: through the product number as SKU, through the EAN as barcode, or through the manufacturer product number as barcode. New Item and Removed Item know one value each on this channel, Insert and Delete. So a product dropping out of the Condition or deleted in TRADElube disappears from the shop, and there is no skipping here.

Prices takes two prices. Sales Price is the price the product carries in the shop. It is preset with a script taking the special offer price where there is one and it lies below the sales price. Compare Price is the struck-through price beside it and is preset with the list price where that is higher. Each of your price groups is on offer as a source in both rows.

Media and Collections carry the same drop-down with three values above their assignments. Add and Remove brings the shop into line with TRADElube, so it also removes there what you have removed here. Add Only leaves what exists in place, which is right where images or collections are still maintained in the shop from another side. Disabled switches the section off.

Meta Fields is the place for everything Shopify keeps no field of its own for. Each mapped property gets a tab with the three rows Namespace, Key and Value. The first two come from the shop's metafield definition, the value is supplied by the property on the product.

Special features and limits

The manufacturer goes along as a name, not as a record. The row Vendor in the Common section carries your manufacturer's name into the shop's field of the same name. No channel mapping is created in the process, so what stands in the shop afterwards is a text and not a reference.

Type and Tags are unticked out of the box, and they are the two most interesting rows of the section nonetheless. Both take one of your properties as a source or, as a script, the product's categories, the script reaching each category along with its path.

The reason to tick them lies in the shop: an automated collection in Shopify fetches its products through a condition, and product type and tag are among the fields such a condition can work on. Whoever sends their categories along as tags can have the shop assemble the collections from them, rather than maintaining them through Collections Upload. Which of the two paths is the right one you decide once per shop.

You pick the language per assignment, not per tab. The Common section 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.

This task and Products Upload (Minimal) exclude each other. If one of them is already on the channel, the other can no longer be created.

Further reading