Retailers who manage a single product catalog across multiple Shopify stores catering to either different regions of a country or for strategic business reasons, often maintain central inventory and process orders at multiple locations.
To provide omni-channel solutions like pre-order management, an OMS has to ensure a centralized inventory is managed and a single pre-order catalog activates and deactivates products for pre-order on each of the multiple Shopify stores to maintain a single source of truth.
HotWax Commerce syncs products from the multiple Shopify stores with their own unique internal ID using a product sync integration. When a retailer has multiple Shopify stores selling a single product catalog, one store has to be configured as a reference catalog in HotWax Commerce and the remaining stores as child catalogs. The basic assumption behind here that any product that is sold by the retailer will be present in the reference catalog.
The products are synced from Shopify from the reference catalog into the HotWax Commerce OMS with the product SKU, Shopify internal ID using the product sync batch job. For the child catalogs, products are imported using a different sync that only creates associations with the product imported from the reference catalog. This way a single product in HotWax Commerce is associated with all the Shopify stores. Each product’s unique Shopify internal ID is used to differentiate between the products. Its unique ID, along with the Shopify Config IDlinked to that ID, is used to push product updates from HotWax to each of the multiple Shopify stores selling that product.
Products are first imported from the reference catalog and associations for child catalogs are created after that. Therefore it is important to keep in mind that new products should be created for the reference Shopify store first and thereafter in the child stores because the HotWax Commerce OMS will only sync products from the child stores if they are already created and synced from the reference catalog.
Step by step process of how new product is created in Shopify and imported in HotWax Commerce:
- Create a new product in the reference Shopify store.
- Product is imported from the reference Shopify store into HotWax Commerce using the standard product sync batch job.
- Create the same product on other Shopify stores.
- Products are synced from the child Shopify stores into HotWax Commerce to create associations using the Shopify internal ID and Shopify Config ID with the reference catalog product. No new products created for the child catalog in HotWax Commerce.