Before the first publish
Four things, once per connection, and then never again.
- A warehouse with an address. Settings › Warehouses. A marketplace quotes postage from where the parcel leaves and will not list without one.
- 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.
- Categories matched. See Categories and mapping.
- 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.
Publishing covers Shopify, eBay, WooCommerce and Magento. An Amazon connection is for its catalogue, its orders and its stock: listings there are created in Seller Central, and everything on this page about stock, prices and orders applies to them exactly as it does anywhere else.
The preflight
Check, on the product's On your channels block, asks the channel what would stop this product being listed and reports it before anything is sent. It is the honest answer rather than an estimate: a required item specific with no value, a category that is not mapped, a picture the channel will refuse, a missing policy.
When nothing would stop it, 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
- Open the product and find On your channels.
- Find the connection. Press Check if you want the preflight first.
- 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
- In the products list, filter to what you want and tick it. Select every product loaded takes the lot.
- Choose Publish from the selection bar.
- Choose where to publish. One connection at a time, deliberately: the answers differ per channel and a run against three at once would report three different failures as one.
- 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 refused and listed as such rather than being quietly skipped.
Edits after the first publish
Nobody has to press send after fixing a price. Every change marks the listing with what is waiting to go - stock, price, title, description, pictures, category, safety details - and a sweep drains the marked ones every couple of 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.
What the states mean
| 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. |
Taking a listing down
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 starts a new listing from nothing.
Archiving a product does not take its listings down. That is deliberate: the two are different decisions, and one of them is irreversible on a marketplace.