Best Practices for Using Plytix’s Shopify Integration

Avoid common errors when processing your products into Shopify with these helpful tips

Plytix’s direct integration with Shopify is a helpful tool to both add and enrich products in your store. To achieve the best out of this tool, this article will go over some tips and best practices we recommend to help you avoid potential errors when processing your products into your Shopify store.

Required fields

Working with parents and variants

Working with product lists

Metafields

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Required fields 

Whether you're completely new to Shopify or are already selling on different stores, there are some helpful things to keep in mind when using Plytix’s Shopify connector!

When you're syncing Plytix with your Shopify store for the first time, we recommend running tests with the connector in a store that is not active prior to optimizing your mapping. This will avoid any potential mistakes or accidental overwriting of products in an active store and will help you fix any errors you detect beforehand. 

Both “Handle” and “Title” are required fields in Shopify; “Handle” is required for channel processing overall and “Title” is required for new products. 

When it comes to “Title,” we do not recommend having the same title for two products; always aim to have unique titles for each product to ensure your data is optimized for both Shopify and search engine results. 

And while it may sound obvious: remember to make sure all of your sellable products have a value for their key attributes — like price — when you match them in the connector.

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Working with parents and variants

When it comes to variants, Shopify works with non-sellable parents. This means that the parent works as a reference product of what you’re selling; but what you’re really selling in Shopify in this case are the variants. So we recommend defining attributes in which your product variants may differ like 'price' and 'size' exclusively at the variant level. 

When working with variants, Shopify allows you to define up to three fields to create variants called 'Options' (Option 1, Option 2, and Option 3); You need to at least map one of the options to create variants in your store. When mapping options, you should keep the following in mind:

• If you map an “Option Name,” you should also map the corresponding “Option Value” (i.e.: Option 1 Name mapped with Option 1 Value)
• Follow the right chronological order when mapping Option Name with Option Value (e.g: Do not map “Option 2 Name” if “Option 1” Name isn’t mapped yet)

Shopify only allows you to display up to three variant fields in your store. So, by default, the attributes associated with “Option 1/Option 2/Option 3 Value”  will be the same for all products. However, some attributes may only be relevant for some variants rather than all of them. 

For example, let’s say you sell sets of plates and also chocolate; you may want to display the weight for both products, but there’s no point in having “flavor” as a variant field for plates. In this case, you may want to use computed attributes to specify which attributes will apply for the variant fields in your store depending on the product. If this is your case, feel free to contact your account manager for further assistance on how this can be done! 

You may wonder if you can delete products in Shopify by removing them from your product list and then syncing it back to Shopify… 

Long story short, you can’t delete products in Shopify through Plytix. Products that are already processed in Shopify can only be deleted directly in Shopify. But here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

• If you remove a variant from your processing list, the variant will be removed from Shopify and thus will no longer be visible. For example, let’s say you used to have 3 variants by color for a t-shirt: red, blue, and green. But, you’ve decided to no longer sell the green t-shirt, so you’ve removed it from your Shopify processing list. The next time you process your list, the green variant will no longer be one of the options in your product.
• When it comes to parent and single products, even if you remove them from your processing list or delete them in Plytix, they will still be in Shopify.

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Working with product lists

Before jumping into Product Lists, it is important to consider the caching system Plytix has in its Shopify integration. 

Caching helps speed up processing for unchanged products since your last sync; after 2 syncs, you should have a cache for all your products which means that processing times will be significantly lower after this, as only modified and new products will be processed.

Now that you know how caching works, here’s where product lists come into play:

• You may feel tempted to change your product lists for different reasons, like wanting to update specific product batches only or creating a new list for new product launches. However, we don't recommend switching between different product lists as such a change could result in products being removed from the cache. Depending on the products included in the old and new lists, you may need to completely resync some products from the old list to update the cache. To ensure faster processing times, we recommend sticking with one dedicated product list per Shopify store.
• As an extra step, you can also set conditions on parent and variant-levels to ensure both are ready to be processed into Shopify
• If you are syncing new products into your Shopify store, make sure they’re added to your lists!

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Metafields

If you’re interested in using Shopify metafields, check out our Help Center article here!

When using metafields with a definition, make sure the theme you’ve picked is compatible with Metafields 2.0 — otherwise, you won’t be able to sync metafields with a definition to your store.