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Getting set up to be ready for selling on Shopify through Rain POS can be an involved process. Below are some important areas to pay attention to as you get ready.

 

Seeing Double: Avoid Duplicating Images

When you're adding images to a product, there is a tab for Images that lets you enter as many as you want. Sometimes we see stores use one of those image files on the main Details tab at the bottom of the column of info about the item. This is actually the image area for Variants to use, and it's important to take care here. Entering the same image file in both of those places will send the image twice to Shopify and in some cases it can show up twice. Don't use identical image files in the Images tab AND in the area at the bottom of each variant.

 

Brace for Impact: Your Categories Will Be Flattened

In Rain POS you are able to create as many categories and subcategories as you like, and your subcategories can go many levels down, if needed. The integration with Shopify connects your categories to collections in Shopify, and those don't allow for sub-levels. The result will be the flattening of your categories in both systems.

What that means is that you'll have a single list of alphabetized categories, and that can be problematic in some situations:

• Let's say that under your Gifts category you have a subcategory named Accessories. Under your Men's category, you also have a subcategory named Accessories. After the flattening happens, you'll end up with two categories with identical names and neither of them anywhere near their former 'parent' categories.

Solution: Give your subcategories more specific, unique names. In the examples above, renaming them to Accessory Gifts and Men's Accessories would avoid all confusion after integration.

• Another issue can arise from top-level categories. These are often empty and are just steps along the path to guide your customers to a bottom-level subcategory that contains the specific items they're wanting to browse. Empty categories won't display in the list of customer-facing collections in Shopify, so upper level categories like this are largely useless in the integration.

Solution: After integrating, in Rain POS go to Website > Categories and work your way down the list, deleting any former top-level categories that have no products in them.

One thing you can do to replace the empty categories would be to use some features in Shopify that will help your customers find your products better: Types and Tags. In Shopify enter the names of former parent categories into your products as Types (for general products) and/or Tags (for specific groupings of product) for better search results in Shopify.

 

Pick Any Two (As Long As One of Them's a SKU)

In our system there are three primary product identifier codes you can use for your items, UPC, Manufacturer Number, and SKU. This works great internally with our reports and informational tools relating to your products, but there can be a conflict with the Shopify integration.

Shopify allows only two product identifier codes for each item, a SKU and whatever else you prefer (UPC, Manufacturer Number, etc.). In our system if you have all three of our identifiers saved for a product, we can only move two of them over to Shopify. In this scenario, the Manufacturer Number draws the short straw and does not get moved over.

Solution:

• Before you sync your data, make sure the identifiers you want to move over to Shopify and use there are in your products.
• Make sure that either UPC or Manufacturer Number is blank in products you will sync before you begin integrating.
• OR, be willing to not have Manufacturer Numbers in Shopify if you have all three identifiers populated in our system.

 

Multiple Unwanted Guests

Some stores beginning our Shopify integration have a history of data in Shopify from customers they no longer work with and/or products they no longer carry. If this is your situation we highly recommend cleaning out the old data and deleting anything you wouldn't want in both systems. After the integration, it will be twice as much work to clean them out.

 

Watch Your Weights

In our system, if you track weight values for your items, you choose either Pounds or Kilograms, and enter those values as decimals. So something that weighs 24 ounces would be entered as a weight of 1.5 (pounds), and something that weighs 1,500 grams would be entered as 1.5 (kg).

Shopify allows you to specify either pounds or ounces, kilograms or grams, and they won't translate if they're entered with either of the smaller measures. For example, in Shopify, if you have a product with a weight value of 8 and it's set to work in ounces, in our system that would show up as 8 pounds. Similarly, an item with a weight value of 250 set to work with grams in Shopify will show up as 250 pounds in our system.

Solution: Adjust the way you list your items in Shopify so they work with pounds or kilograms instead of ounces or grams.