Connect your store

Shopping needs a product catalogue. Connect the store, sync it, then choose which products are actually worth checking.

What you'll learn

• How to connect Shopify or WooCommerce
• What a sync does, and what happens at your cap
• What to do after the first check cycle

Before you start

You need Shopping access: a Shopcite lane, or beta access granted on a core plan. See Shopping overview.

Connect

1. Open Shopping.
2. Choose Shopify or WooCommerce and authorise the connection.
3. Sync the catalogue.

What comes across is product identity and attributes: names, descriptions, prices and the URLs. It is read access to your catalogue, not an order or customer feed.

Then choose, rather than track everything

A sync brings your catalogue in. It does not follow that every product should be checked, because a product check is metered per product, per engine, per window.

Your lane caps how many products and how many shopping prompts you can have active. When a sync would take you past the product cap, the cap is enforced across the whole account rather than per sync, so you choose what stays active instead of quietly exceeding it.

Pick, in this order:

1. Margin leaders. Visibility on a thin-margin product is a cost, not a win.
2. Products with a clear buyer. Engines recommend with a qualifier attached.
3. Products in a contested category. Where a competitor's product keeps being named instead.

After the first cycle

Three things to read:

• Which products were named at all. An absent product is often an unquotable product page rather than an unpopular product.
• What the answers said. The description an engine gives of your product frequently comes from a marketplace listing rather than from your own page.
• Whose products were named instead. That is the competitive read, and it is usually more specific than anything at brand level.

Keeping the connection healthy

A store connection can expire or be revoked when somebody changes app permissions on the store. The connector reports the connection as broken rather than serving a stale catalogue. Reconnect from the same page, and re-sync.

Try this in Outercite

Connect the store, sync, then deactivate every product you would not defend in a margin meeting. The remaining list is what your coverage should be spent on.

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