Publishing

Publishing requirements

Four things, once per connection, and then never again.

1. A warehouse with an address. Settings › Warehouses. A marketplace quotes postage from where the parcel leaves and will not list without one.
2. Listing settings. On the connection: eBay's postage, payment and returns policies and its ships-from location, and a default condition. Read live from your account at the channel, and creatable from here if you have none.
3. Categories matched. See Categories and mapping.
4. Safety details, if you sell into the EU. Settings › Safety details, then point products at a set.

Per product, a channel wants a price, at least one picture, a category and the item specifics its category asks for. The readiness score on the product screen lists the rest in the order worth working in.

The preflight

Check, on the product's On your channels block, checks the channel's current requirements and reports any issue before data is sent: a required item specific with no value, an unmapped category, an unsupported image or a missing policy.

When all requirements are met, the block says Ready to publish. Publishing in bulk offers the same thing as Check first, which runs the preflight over every product you ticked and lists what each one needs without listing anything.

Publishing one product

1. Open the product and find On your channels.
2. Find the connection. Press Check if you want the preflight first.
3. Press Publish. The listing is created at the channel and the block shows what the channel calls it, with a link to see it there.

A product with variants is published as one listing with its variations, in the shape that channel uses - see Variations. The block reports how many of your variants are linked, so a variation the channel refused is visible rather than silent.

Publishing in bulk

1. In the products list, filter to what you want and tick it. Select every product loaded takes the lot.
2. Choose Publish from the selection bar.
3. Choose where to publish. Each run uses one connection so its validation results and channel responses remain clear.
4. Press Check first to see what would happen, or Publish to do it.

The run reports progress as it goes and can be stopped part-way; what has already been published stays published. Anything refused is listed afterwards with the channel's own words. Drafts and archived products are reported as ineligible.

Listing profiles

A listing profile is a named set of the answers a connection needs - postage and returns policies, listing type, where the parcel leaves from - so that “everything heavy posts like this” is said once instead of on every product. They only exist where a channel asks something of a listing; eBay is the one that asks most.

A connection’s Listing settings tab lists Default settings and every profile down the left, and the one chosen on the right. The default settings apply to every product on the connection; a profile is an exception for the products you choose. New profile at the foot of the list starts one, and each profile shows how many products use it.

One profile can be the default. Every product on that connection with no profile of its own uses it, so you assign the exceptions rather than everything.

To set one on a single product, open it, choose the store at the top of the page and use Listing profile in the store’s card under On your channels, beside Publish. To set one on many, tick the rows in the products list and choose Actions › Listing profile: the store, then the profile, applied to the whole selection in one go. Only stores that actually have a profile are listed there.

The connection decides is the first option in both places and is a real answer, not a blank: it takes the product off any profile of its own and it goes back to the default, or to the connection’s own settings where there is no default.

Sales channels on Shopify

A Shopify product can be live in the admin and on sale nowhere. The two are separate: Active is the product’s status, and which sales channels it appears in - Online Store, Shop, Point of Sale - is a different setting that Shopify leaves empty unless it is told. A product created through an API and not published to a channel shows 0 in the Channels column and cannot be found by a shopper.

So the connection is asked. If your store has one sales channel, products go onto it without a question. If it has several, choose which on the connection’s Listing tab under Sales channels - every sales channel this store has, or one by name. Until that is chosen, a product still publishes, and the run says in plain words that it went nowhere a shopper can see.

This applies when a product is created. A later republish leaves sales channels alone, so unpublishing something from your Online Store in Shopify’s own admin stays unpublished.

Edits after the first publish

Eligible changes are queued automatically. Each listing records what is waiting to be updated - stock, price, title, description, pictures, category or safety details - and the queue is processed every few minutes.

The product list shows this per channel: a listing showing an older version says so and names the fields waiting. Send now pushes everything that connection is waiting on immediately, rather than only this product.

Listing statuses

State	Meaning
Not sent yet	The product has never been published to this connection.
Up to date	The channel has everything this system holds.
Waiting to send	Changed here, not yet at the channel. The fields are named.
On the channel, not on sale	Published and paused there rather than ended.
The listing has ended	It is down at the channel. Publishing again starts a new one.

Removing a listing

Unpublish on the product, or Take off sale from the list for many at once. What it does depends on the channel, and the confirmation says which:

• Where a listing can be paused - a shop - the product stays, stops being for sale, and keeps its page, its address and its reviews. Publishing again puts it back on sale.
• Where a listing can only be ended - a marketplace - ending it gives up the listing's watchers, its place in search and its sales history, and publishing again creates a new listing.

Archiving a product does not remove its listings. Product lifecycle and channel listing status are managed separately because ending a marketplace listing may be irreversible.