Product Identifier

There are two types of identifiers that can be mapped to Shopify. Firstly, the SKU is your own identifier that your company creates to associate with the product. Secondly, you can send across the barcode (ISBN, UPC, GTIN, etc.).

Product Title

This is simply the name of the product that will be displayed on Shopify. It is good practice to keep SEO (search engine optimisation) in mind when creating these titles.

Product Description (Body HTML)

This is the description that you will see on the product page. This is an opportunity to show off other attributes in an HTML format and really sell your product. Due to the fact that Shopify doesn’t allow you to list other specifications by default, it is a good idea to include them in this HTML field. Again, it is worth keeping SEO in mind when writing these descriptions.

Vendor

This is here to provide the provider of the products on the product page to your customers in order to increase trust in the product source. Often, it may be the case where your business is the provider of the products and in this case, simply put your own company in the vendor field.

Product Type

Your products can have one standardised (Shopify defaults) product type and one custom product type. These help customers to find what they are looking for and can help you internally to keep your products organised. These can also be used to automate collections which can help with menu navigations.

Product Collection

Collections are essentially grouping your products into categories. You can use these collections to design your navigation menus on Shopify and make it easier for your customers to find what they are looking for, for example, “Men’s T-Shirts”. After you create a collection it can be shown on your online store as a webpage with a gallery of the products that are in the collection. Your customers can then click on a product to visit that product’s page. The layout and design of collection pages depend on the Shopify theme you use. You can also have automated collections that sort products automatically into these categories by tags, vendor, etc.

Product Tags

You can add tags to products to allow your customers to filter by specific items like colour, range, size, etc.

Variant Option Name/Value

If your products are organised into parent/variant relationships, for example, a t-shirt design with four different colours, then Shopify allows you to create “options”. You can create up to three options on a parent product. You create the option name for the parent products, for example, “Size” and then create the option value on the variant SKUs like “Small, Medium & Large”. This means your product page will display the parent product with its title, description, etc., and have a drop-down where customers can select the different options.

Product Status

Products can be either “Draft” or “Active” on Shopify. If they are in "Draft" mode they will not appear on your live Shopify site but merely exist on the backend. Active means they will go live for sale on the website. This is useful if you want to add products to your store and prepare them for launch, then simply make them active on the launch date.

OneTimePIM’s Role

OneTimePIM can map to all of the above Shopify fields and also dictate price, etc. This means you can easily enter and edit your data once in the PIM and distribute it across different Shopify sites. The PIM also handles the images and has a unique option to re-order the images which will then reflect on Shopify which is something our customers often find time-consuming to handle within Shopify itself. The PIM can also dictate the product status easily by turning it online or offline, but you can also remove products from a selected Shopify store entirely by hiding them from view within the PIM channel.

Our Shopify Connector is unique in the fact that it handles everything on the PIM itself. This means much less work involved in populating your Shopify store and being able to update several at once. The Connector also gives you in-depth reporting on each run you have made (manual or scheduled) and tells you exactly what it has added, deleted or modified.

You can find out more about our Shopify connector in our OneTimePIM Shopify connector articles area.