How to add products to your shopify account and have it synchronized in WordPress

This is a quick tutorial that will guide you through the steps of updating or creating new item pages for your Shopify account. I give for granted that you have already a WordPress Installation, are familiar with it, have already installed the Shopify Plugin for WordPress and configured in order to correctly pull the data from your Shopify account and display it to your WordPress Installation.

NOTE:
This tutorial aims at providing some guidance to a person that you have to set as responsible on updating a shopify account on your behalf.

Let’s get started. 

1- Login at this URL: https://www.shopify.com/login
2- Fill the login form with your site store address, (yourlogin)
3- Fill the login form with your id  and password

Once you have successfully logged in you are redirected to  the Dashboard, from here do the following to either edit, add or delete products.

1- From the Left side menu click on “Products” and expand the menu to see what other choices you have
2- Choose products if you wan to edit, add, or delete a product
3- Choose Collection if you want to edit, add or delete a Product category. (in this tutorial we are going to create a new product).

Select the product  you want to edit from the list.

NOTE 1:
Please remember that if you edit, add or delete a category on Shopify you will have to update the WordPress website manually as the normal plugin configuration doesn’t have an option to automatically add new categories. If you only add products no manual editing is required on your WordPress website as the products will be mirrored automatically and will populate the existing categories.

NOTE 2: IMPORTANT..!
Do not paste directly the text that you have copied from another web page or from Microsoft Word or any other authoring software as this keep the format style of that particular document and will override the one used from Shopify making the product page inconsistent and visually not professional as some of the fonts and formatting will differ from the rest of the page / products. In order to prevent this to happen do the following:

a- Open a notepad application such as MS Notepad. If you cannot find it copy and paste this path on windows explorer: C:\Users\Dell\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Accessories then click on the Notepad icon.

b- Copy the content from your source, (MS Word etc.), then paste the item description into Notepad, (it will clear all the formatting).

c- Now select all the content again from notepad and copy it to the Shopify description editor. You have just cleared it from all the formatting.

 

Now let’s pretend that we want to edit a product because we have found out that the information given is wrong or the price needs to be changed. Proceed as following:
Once the product page loads you can edit the text from the title bar or the description from the text editor, (whichever you need to).

If you have to change the picture you can do so by hovering in the existing photo of the item, (in the box below the description), and select delete, this if you are editing a product that already has a photo, for a new product you will just need to click on the link “upload picture” on the top right of the box.

(this is a product with already a picture)

(this is a product with no picture)

NOTE 3:

Please remember that all the pictures will have to be saved with the extension .jpg and optimized for web view, (shopify accept also .GIF and .png but we prefer a jpg compression), also have to be resized accordingly, in our case we had photos as large as 4000 px and we resized them to 512 by 512 pixel.
More on how to resize the pictures will follow in a later tutorial. You can use paint.net or Gimp, (Open source), or if you have a license Adobe Photoshop will do it just fine.

 

let’s set the rest of the options

Set the price

This is option is found on the box just below the image. The shopify Currency is already set to your Currency but you can change it from the settings. Now you just need to type the new price in figures, if you are not sure do not fill the box next to the price, (compare at price), we are not using that option at this time.

Keep a stock count of the inventory 

1- The first entry is the SKU, (Stock Keeping Unit). This is your product unique code that will allow you to distinguish from others.

2- the next entry on the right end side of the SKU is the Barcode, here you can feel your numbers if you also want to keep a track of that.

3- The inventory Policy is the next field entry and will toggle the inventory sales count on or off.

Shipping Options

1- Here we can configure a few basic option that will let us chose a weight unit such as kg, (Kilo Grams), oz, (Ounces), lb, (Libra), and g, (Grams). From here we can also select the option of excluding the item from shipping.

2- The Variants entry is for additional customer choices that might need to be set and could reflect onto the price of the item, (e.g.. Size / Color).

NOTE 4:
If you create a variant you will have to assign a new SKU / barcode and price at each of the variants and this can be done by clicking on the link at the bottom right, “Add variant”.

SEO Listing preview

Expanding this box will give you a preview of how the Search Engines will display the title and description of the item you have just added, From here you can make corrections to your liking

Visibility

This option is offered in the right side module, top box. by unchecking the Buy Button or the Online store you can still have your product on database but not visible to your online store. This is particularly useful when you want to temporarily remove a product from the sales but you do not want to delete it from your collection.

Organization

You can distinguish your products by adding a “Product Type”, (e.g.. Hamburgers, smoked Meats, Bakery etc.), this is particularly useful when you have hundreds of products and you want to visualize only a specific range of products.

Vendor

Use this option if you want to classify your products according to the manufacture and supplier.

Tags

Add tags to products to help your customer to easily find a specific item, (e.g.. adding the tags “Brown Bread”, and “French Sourdough” to the bakery Collection in essence will create two subcategories)

That’s it, just save and load your WordPress site to view the changes.

Click here if you want to download this tutorial as a PDF file.