Introduction
When onboarding vendors, it is common practice to simply enter their credentials in the Inventory Feed and let all those products come into the fold.
However, it is also common for Marketplaces to only sell a subset of their vendors’ catalog, especially when some of the categories don’t really fall into the Marketplaces’ market or segment. When this happens you can sometimes have hundreds or thousands of variants imported into the Inventory Feed that are counting for your SKU thresholds.
As long as the products are tagged and you enable the option to only import tagged items under the publishing tab of the inventory feed settings, Onport provides you with a way to filter the SKUs being imported from your vendor’s stores or catalog files.
Disclaimer
Some vendor platforms, like BigCommerce, may not hold the concept of product tags. In these cases, this method may not be useful.
Tagging
These tags can either be already on the product or, alternatively, be tags that are agreed upon between you and your vendor for greater accuracy and simplicity in the filtering.
❗️Tagging must be made in the vendor’s e-commerce platform or in the source file used in the feed. For reference, see how to tag items in e-commerce platforms.
You can check what tags are currently used in each of these products by clicking the variant name in the Inventory Feed or by checking the source file, if the Vendor has been onboarded using a file-based Inventory Feed, such as CSV, FTP, or Google Sheet:
Filtering
Filtering can be made by either excluding products holding certain tags or by including only products that have a certain tag or a specific combination of them, for greater accuracy. You’ll find this feature under the Publishing tab of the Inventory Feed settings:
Just select either method, exclusion, or inclusion, add the relevant tags by typing them and clicking the plus sign on the right-hand side, and save when you’re done. These changes will take effect after the next fetch.
❗️Keep in mind that tags are case-sensitive.
Connected VS not connected items
This method will automatically skip products that are currently not connected to a product in Onport on the next fetch.
However, if filtering by tag would exclude a product that is currently connected (and more often than not, published to your store) Onport will automatically set its inventory to 0 and brand it as unavailable in the Inventory Feed, as though the vendor had removed it from their store.
In these cases, you need to evaluate if this product is still meant to be available in your store.
- If so, you need to refine the tagging so that it includes this product and fetch the feed again.
- If not, just disconnect any products in this situation and they will be skipped on the next fetch.
❗️Please note that you may also need to remove these items from your store.
Troubleshooting
If you’re making changes to the tagging but the set of imported products isn’t changing, it may be worth clearing all the tags, setting the filtering to exclude, saving and fetching the feed. After this, you can start applying tags again with a clean slate and see the changes occur in the set of products being imported.
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.