Push Sync is a powerful feature that lets you send item information from Heartland Retail to Shopify. In this guide, you’ll find out how to set up, use, and troubleshoot Shopify Push Sync.

First, you’ll need to have an active Shopify v2 connection in your Heartland Retail account.

To enable Push Sync, navigate to the Items Information tab of the Shopify v2 connection you’re using (Settings >> Integrations >> Shopify v2 >> Manage). At the top, select Push item information from Heartland Retail to Shopify, as shown below.

Important: Push Sync is not an ongoing process. You'll need to initiate a sync each time you want to send item information from Heartland Retail to Shopify.

Next, select which items you’d like to sync to Shopify. You can sync all your items, or use filters to sync only a subset. The filtering tool works just like it does everywhere else in Heartland Retail with one exception: Push Sync assumes you only want to send active items, so it will always ignore inactive ones.

Best Practice: The easiest way to set up this filter is by using a custom field that specifies whether an item should be sold online. For instance, name a field Sell on Shopify and filter for items where that value = Yes.

Next, choose whether to sync only new items, or update existing ones on Shopify.(Careful! This setting can overwrite existing information on Shopify.)

Next, choose whether you want to sync items with no images. You can also choose whether to sync individual items or only those that belong to a grid. Then select whether the synced items should immediately appear as visible on your customer-facing Shopify website. 

Now you’re ready to map your item information. Before you start with the settings on the Shopify integration page, let’s look at some fields that always map the same way.

Best Practice: Review your Heartland Retail item catalog in a spreadsheet to be sure all the information is correct before attempting Push Sync. For example, make sure your descriptions are optimized for customer-facing uses rather than inventory control!

When a push sync in Heartland Retail is completed, the following fields in Shopify will be updated: name, cost_price, description, price, categories, tax_class, brand, weight, width, height, depth, type, is_visible, SKU, UPC, images, inventory_tracking, and modifiers. The push will not update fields in Shopify such as Search Keywords. 

Syncing items with variants (Grids)

Best Practice: If you are an apparel or footwear retailer, it's important that you grid your items in Heartland Retail before pushing items to Shopify. Otherwise, the items will not appear together on Shopify.
If you want to display products with variants such as size and color on your Shopify website, you’ll need to set those up as grids in Heartland Retail. If you have a lot of items that need to be gridded, you may want to consider our auto-gridding service. When you sync a grid, the grid Description will map to Shopify as the Product Name, and each dimension will result in product options on Shopify.

Important: When you sync a grid, only the Long Description from the grid will push to Shopify. So if the gridded items have Long Description populated, but the grid itself does not, nothing will push to Shopify. You cannot have grids with the same name, if any grids have the same name you must update this before doing a push.

Now that you’ve prepared your item catalog’s fixed fields, it’s time to consider the options available for mapping.

If you’d like to set weights for your items individually, you can do that in the Measurements tab of each item’s record, as shown below.

Product Type

Choose which field will map to Shopify Product Type. If no field is mapped here, any newly synced items will appear in the category “Heartland Retail Items”. 

Important: When syncing a grid, be sure to fill in your category field at the grid level. If your gridded items have category information but the grid itself does not, the items will be synced as Heartland Retail Items.

Important: Push Sync will not create new Product Types on Shopify. All categories must exist prior to the sync attempt and exactly match the information sent by Heartland Retail.

If any Product type information in Heartland Retail does not match what’s in your Shopify account, that item will fail to sync with the error “Invalid category”.

Tax Class
All Shopify items require a Tax Class, you need to designate whether an item is Taxable or not. If left blank, we will set the item to Taxable. We recommend using a True or False for whether the Item is Taxable or not. All Taxes must be set up in Shopify to apply.

Tags
Tags have the same meaning as keywords. These are used to help customers find what they are looking for within your website. Customers cant see tags, but your online store search uses tags to categorize and organize search results for customers.

How Updates Work

When you sync an item that has previously synced, you can also control whether certain attributes are updated or left alone on Shopify. 

Item Name, Description, Cost, Price: These attributes are not optional and will always overwrite the information present on Shopify.

Weight: Any item with a blank weight attribute will be synced with the default value specified on your Push Sync settings page and will overwrite current info on Shopify. If you want to set the weights of your items individually, you should do this on Heartland Retail.

Product Type: If you map this field, the push sync will overwrite existing information on Shopify. If you do not map this field, push sync will add un-synced items to the category “Uncategorized Heartland Retail Items” and leave items with existing category information unchanged.

Images

All item images uploaded to the product profile in Heartland Retail will sync to Shopify. Images uploaded to the grid "All Images" section in Heartland Retail will link to the "Images and Videos" section of the product profile on Shopify. These will be the first images that are displayed to the customer on the website. Any images uploaded to the Heartland Retail dimension level on the grid will appear in the product options on Shopify.

Note: Only the primary image per each SKU will be stored and shown by Shopify when a variance color and size is selected. For example, this means once a product color and size are selected on Shopify, only the primary image attached to the variance will be displayed to the customer. This is currently a restriction with the capabilities of the Shopify website.

Now that you’ve mapped all your attributes, you’re ready to start your Push Sync. Simply push the "Push items to Shopify" button.

The sync process itself can take a considerable amount of time, especially the first time it runs. Plan on waiting several hours, or even a couple of days, for a large item catalog.

Once the sync completes, you will see the following screen, which includes the number of total items attempted, the number successfully synced, and the number that did not sync because of errors. To find out what caused the errors, click "Download errors to CSV."

Important: Be sure you download your errors file before you press OK!