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Lesson 1.6Bringing a Shopify catalogue across
The import is one button. What it does and does not keep synchronised afterwards is the part worth knowing.
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This lesson prepares you to: Import an existing catalogue, and know exactly which parts stay in sync afterwards.
Connect, then import
If you already sell on Shopify you do not have to retype your catalogue. You connect your Shopify store to your Helm shop, then run an import that pulls your products across.
Connecting and importing are two separate steps on purpose. Connecting establishes the link. Importing is something you trigger, so nothing appears in your Helm catalogue because a background job decided it should.
When the connection dies, Helm says so
If your Shopify authorisation has expired or been revoked, the import does not tell you to try again later. It tells you to reconnect, because those are different problems with different fixes.
That distinction was learned the hard way. There is a note in the code recording that an App Store reviewer was shown Please try again on 28 July while every single call was coming back unauthorised. Naming the real remedy was the whole fix. Retrying something that will never work is not a helpful error message.
What stays in sync, and what does not
| Change | Syncs? |
|---|---|
| You uninstall the Helm app from Shopify | Yes, the connection is revoked immediately |
| Stock levels change in Shopify | Yes, inventory updates flow across |
| You create or edit a product on Helm | Queued back to Shopify, quietly |
| You publish or unpublish on Helm | Queued back to Shopify, quietly |
Sync failures are silent
Being honest about this one. Every push from Helm back to Shopify is fire and forget: if it fails, nothing is surfaced to you. The two catalogues can drift apart without an error appearing anywhere. If exact parity matters to your operation, check both rather than assuming.
Imported products skip the normal limits
A product you type into Helm is validated as you save it: the title is capped at 140 characters, you can attach at most 12 images, and so on. Lesson 2.1 covers all of it.
Products arriving from Shopify are written by the importer directly and do not pass through that validation. A 300 character Shopify title comes across as a 300 character title. This is worth knowing before you import a large catalogue and wonder why some listings look different from the ones you typed by hand.
Native or Shopify
You do not have to choose one forever. Disconnecting is a single action and it revokes the token without touching the products already imported. They stay in your Helm catalogue as ordinary listings you can edit.