How to process a Shopify channel in Plytix to sync your product data to your Shopify store
This article explains the details of processing a Shopify channel in order to load your products in Shopify for the first time or update them with the information you have stored in Plytix.
If your channel is not yet ready for processing, learn how to create and manage your Shopify channel here. Then, follow the steps in this article to learn how to process your channel.
Downloading your Process Reports
*Skip to any section in this article by clicking on the links above
Processing
You can process your channel in two ways:
1. In your Shopify channel, press the 'Process Now' button at the top right of the channel to manually start processing your product data.
2. Heading over to the "Settings" tab, activate the "Scheduling" option and add your preferred processing options. This will automatically process your Shopify channel at your desired time and frequency. Remember to click 'Save changes'!
ℹ️ You can still manually process your channel in between scheduled processing times.
How Processing Works
When you process a Shopify channel for the first time, processing times will be longer during the first two times the channel is processed for new products, and the first time it is processed for existing products.
This is due to the way Plytix stores the product data you send to Shopify:
1. Whenever you are adding new products to Shopify from Plytix by processing your channel, Plytix will first fetch your product handles and bring them back to your PIM. The handles will be used to identify those products in future syncs.
2. During the second sync, Plytix will create a cache (in other words, a memory) for those products.
3. From this point onwards, the next time you sync your channel, processing times become far faster, as unmodified products remain cached while any modified or new products are updated.
ℹ️ If a channel is duplicated, the connection is changed, or you have switched to a new product list with different products, you'll need to process the channel at least once before Shopify caching is applied.
⚠️ Errors that result from processing a Shopify channel will prevent caching for the products affected. Talk to your customer success manager to resolve processing errors.
💡 You can choose which products to create or update by adding them to your Shopify product list!
Summary
When manually sending information by clicking the 'Process Now' button, you will also get a summary of what you are sending to make sure everything is correct.
Click 'Start Processing' to process your channel and sync new information to Shopify.
ℹ️ Note that both scheduling processing or manually processing your channel will cause it to automatically become "Live", making it count towards your total number of Live Outputs.
After Processing
Return to your Shopify account and refresh to see that the products from your Shopify channel in Plytix now appear in the "Products" section of your store.
If you process your channel and your products do not appear, or you receive an error in the "Process Log" tab of your channel, check what happened by clicking on the date/time processed.
Then, click on the 'Result messages' icon next to the error. Make any changes necessary and process again.
If you are still experiencing difficulties, contact your dedicated Account Manager or reach out to us at help@plytix.com!
💡 Click on the SKU of a product to head to its detail page.
ℹ️ If the "Action" shows as "Skip" for a product, this means the product was already cached and hasn't experienced any changes since the last sync, so there were no updates to it when processing the channel.
Downloading your Process Logs
After your Shopify channel has been processed, you can download your process reports.
You can do that in two ways:
1. In the "Process Log" tab, hover over a processing date/time and click on the 'Download' icon that appears on the right.
2. You can also do it by heading over to a process details page.
To be redirected to a process' detail page, click on a processing time/date in the main "Process Log" tab. Then, click 'Download report'
ℹ️ In your process summary, the number of products reviewed for processing may be different from the number of products synced to your Shopify store. Products reviewed for processing include all the parents and singles of the product list you added to your Shopify channel before processing it. The products synced to your store are those that have either been newly created or updated, it does not include products that have been skipped. Click to learn more about the log detail.
What's next?
- Learn how to import a Shopify CSV template into Plytix
- Learn how to create and manage a Shopify channel
- Learn how to use Shopify metafields