Export new products to Shopify? Or link existing ones?!
This guide explains how to link your existing Shopify products to an Inkthreadable account. Customers using Shopify will generally fall into one of two groups:
You're just getting started, building your store and integrating with Inkthreadable.
You're integrating an already established store.
You can manually link existing Shopify products regardless of which group you're in, but we strongly advise exporting new products from Inkthreadable to Shopify over manually linking, especially if you're just getting started. This creates the product in Shopify for you, and exports data like HS codes, product weights, variant options and more. It's simpler and far quicker than manually linking.
Even if you're already established, you might want to export new products to your Shopify store. If you're launching a new range, or you've recently added some to your store but haven't marketed them yet, it's the preferred option.
Manually linking products has its use cases, especially when you've:
Been established for a while.
Invested in paid ads or SEO.
Been driving social media engagement.
Made sales on products already listed.
If you've been driving traffic to your store, deleting existing products to create new ones runs the risk of impacting your site. If this is you, or you're at all worried about deleting what you've already created then you can link products manually without it having any impact whatsoever.
How to manually link existing Shopify products
This process links products that exist in your Shopify store with Inkthreadable's API. You're essentially telling Inkthreadable which product variants and design files to use when fulfilling orders for the products you link.
Changes made to this link don't affect your store. If you want to make changes to the product itself, you'll need to edit the product listing in your Shopify dashboard. This is useful for adding new variants, or removing variants that Inkthreadable can't fulfil. The examples below will help illustrate this.
Please note: if you want to add printed neck labels to any products you'll first need to set these up in your account for them to be available during this process. Learn how to set up printed labels here.
Log in to your Shopify dashboard and Inkthreadable account, then head to your integrations page.
You'll see a list of all available integrations, and Shopify will be listed as connected. If it's not, you'll first need to integrate your store.
Click Connected > Link Products.
This loads your Shopify product linking page. It can take a while as it's reading a lot of data from your store to populate a list of products, so please give it a minute.
Depending on your journey so far you'll see every product in your Shopify store listed as either 0% linked, 100% linked, or something in between.
100% linked products are likely the result of a successful product export from your Inkthreadable account to Shopify. Any orders for these products will be sent to Inkthreadable for fulfilment.
Any partially linked products need some attention from you. It means some of the variants haven't been linked, and orders for unlinked variants will not be sent to Inkthreadable for fulfilment. It's important you address any partially linked products to prevent orders being left unfulfilled. You can follow the process below to fix it.
0% linked products have been created in Shopify and have not yet been linked to Inkthreadable. Any orders for these products will not be sent to Inkthreadable for fulfilment; they need linking first.
Click the Edit button. This loads the linking page for the product you're working on.
Click the Link product dropdown button and use the search features to select the product you want to use for fulfilment.
Then click the Link options button that becomes available once you've chosen a base product. This opens a mapping window, allowing you to quickly map colour and size variants available for your selected product with the variants in your Shopify store.
The system will automatically detect and map colours and sizes where it can. Where it can't, manually map them yourself. When you save you'll see each colour and size variant is linked automatically, and if you've managed to cover each variant the progress bar will jump to 100%.
The 100% progress means each product is linked, but we're not quite finished yet. We need to add a design file and mockup to the product link to use during production.
Scroll to the bottom of the linking page to find the mockups section. You'll see your product images from Shopify have been pulled through. Click any of these images to use as mockups, or use the Upload button too add a new image to use as your mockup. For each mockup, define the decoration area so we know how the mockup relates to production.
Scroll a little further and follow the same process for your design file: upload your files and define which decoration area they are to be used for.
If you see a little red warning over your design file it means your image is not saved to the correct dimensions as displayed beneath the decoration area.
Uploading a design file at the wrong dimensions is possible, but when sent for production this design file will be proportionately scaled to fit the dimensions of the product. This means the resulting product won't be decorated at the size you're expecting, and it won't be considered a fault as we've used the file as uploaded.
Click Save when you're happy with everything. Your product has been linked!
Manually linking a product with mismatching variants
If you've created a product in Shopify and manually linking to Inkthreadable, chances are not all variants will be available for fulfilment. If you already have a product partially linked, the reason is always a variant mismatch.
The same process above applies, with some crucial extra steps to avoid taking orders for products you can't fulfil.
In this example, 3XS is not available for the Creator 2.0. In fact, this size isn't available for any t-shirt in the Inkthreadable catalogue.
The solution is to delete this variant from your Shopify store. Delete all 3XS variants, save the product on your store dashboard, and refresh your linking page. This will remove it as an option for linking.
Likewise, the Creator 2.0 is available up to 5XL in white. On Shopify it's listed up to 3XL, and if we want to offer the additional sizes the solution is adding the new sizes to the product n Shopify, saving, and refreshing the linking page. This will allow you to link the new sizes to Inkthreadable.
Remember to click Save on your linking page to commit all changes before leaving.