Helm › Helm University › Track 2 › Lesson 2.1
Lesson 2.1Every field on a product, and its real limit
Thirteen fields, two of them required, and every one has a hard ceiling that rejects rather than trims.
Prefer to listen? This is the same lesson, word for word. The text below is the transcript.
This lesson prepares you to: Fill in a listing knowing exactly what each field accepts and which two are the only ones you cannot skip.
Only two fields are required
You can create a product with a title and a price and nothing else. Everything else is optional and can be filled in later.
| Field | Limit | Required |
|---|---|---|
| Title | 2 to 140 characters | Yes |
| Price | 0 to 1,000,000 dollars | Yes |
| Description | 5,000 characters | No |
| Compare at price | Same range as price | No |
| Category | 60 characters | No |
| Cover image | 500 character address | No |
| Images | 12 maximum, 500 characters each | No |
| Needs shipping | Yes or no | No, defaults to yes |
| Weight | 0 to 1,000,000 grams | No |
| Stock | 0 to 1,000,000 | No, defaults to 0 |
| Track stock | Yes or no | No, defaults to yes |
| Tags | 300 characters, space separated | No |
Over the limit is rejected, not trimmed
A 200 character title does not get cut down to 140. The save fails. This matters most when you are pasting from somewhere else, because product titles on other marketplaces routinely run longer than Helm accepts.
The one exception is worth knowing: products imported from Shopify are written straight into the catalogue and skip this validation entirely. A 300 character Shopify title arrives intact. That is why an imported catalogue can contain listings you could not have typed by hand.
The default that catches people out
Stock defaults to zero and stock tracking defaults to on. Create a product, forget the stock field, publish it, and you have a live listing that nobody can buy. It will not warn you. Lesson 2.3 covers what to do about it, including the switch that turns tracking off entirely.
Two fields that are not what they look like
Tags is a single 300 character string, not a list. Type them separated by spaces. Nothing parses them into anything cleverer.
Currency is not a field you can set. Every price on Helm is US dollars, stored as whole cents, and there is no route in the entire product interface that changes it. If you are selling internationally, you are selling in dollars.
Prices are integer cents
A price of 24.99 is stored as 2499. There are no fractional cents anywhere in Helm's money, by design, which is why nothing you enter ever ends up a hundredth of a penny off.