Introduction

This article will show you how product publishing works in Onport and how to manage the settings related to it.

After setting up a vendor in your Onport account, uploading and fetched their inventory feed, it’s time to publish their products to your store. 

Publishing new items to your online store

Once you have fetched your vendor’s inventory feed, it will show up under your Inventory Feeds tab. Clicking into the feed, you will be able to view the full product catalog of your vendor.

Simply select the items you want to publish on your own store by clicking the boxes, and clicking Publish on the top panel:

Now the items should display in your store, enabling your customers to place orders.

Their prices and stock levels are synced with your vendor’s site, but you can manually change this in the settings (discussed later on in this article).

If a product goes out of stock in your vendor's store, the product will be marked as 0 in Onport, and will show as out of stock on your store. The product will not be automatically unpublished.

🔎 If you are looking to have this process more customized, there are many Shopify apps that manage this, such as Zero Out.

Note: Ensure that you have connected your vendor in the order processing tab: Contacts > Order. This way when an item is purchased, the order will directly display in the vendor store.

Connecting products to Onport that already exist in your store

a) Manual approach

In the case you already have existing products published in your store that were not published through Onport, you will only need to connect them to your Onport account instead of publishing them.

You can find the non-connected items by filtering the Status of an inventory feed by Not connected:

This filtered list will then display all products that have not been connected, and each item has a Connect button. You will need to click this button to connect it to your Onport account.

Now that the items are connected, you will be able to view and manage the orders and settings related to the items directly from your Onport account.

b) Automatic approach

Alternatively, you can use the setting to "Automatically connect by SKU" under the inventory feed settings:

After enabling it, saving and fetching the feed, this setting will ensure that items with a matching SKU in your store and Onport will be automatically connected. 

We also recommend enabling this setting under Integrations > (your store) > Inventory and Pricing tab:

This setting will ensure that the system will automatically connect any new items that you create in your store with variants in the vendors' inventory feeds if they have a matching SKU.

Manually creating items in your store

If you need to create products manually on your site and still want to sync the inventory and pricing from Onport, you can do so. You will need to create the items manually in your store, then go into the inventory feeds in Onport and manually connect the items together.

Connecting multiple products to one item

❗️It is important to note that it is not possible to resell a specific vendor item as many different products. For example, if you wanted to market a rug as two different products, such as “rug for baby’s room” and another product with the same rug being “rug for office”, this wouldn’t be possible.

The reverse of this, however, is possible. So you could link many different rugs (items) under the same product.

Manage your settings

Onport syncs the name, prices, stock, etc. of your vendor's products with your store by default. However, if you are looking to change the settings, you can do so by clicking into the inventory feed and clicking Settings in the right-hand corner.

Under the publishing tab, you can manage your settings, such as how the names of the products will be displayed on your site, what should be automatically synced, etc:

🔎 For more information on product catalog topics, we would recommend checking these articles.