Pushing your products is a handy way of copying your inventory from one platform to the other!
Overview
This article will go over what we mean by the term "pushing" and how to perform this action. If you're not sure whether you should be Linking or Pushing, check out this article.
If you're running in to some trouble with pushing items, check out this article on Pushing Troubleshooting or contact Support.
So, what does Pushing mean?
Pushing products is the easiest way to copy your inventory from one platform to the other without having to do double data entry! If you already have your inventory on both platforms, you may not need to push anything at all. However, if most, if not all, of your data is on one platform, you'll likely want to do a Catalog Migration. We also offer Bulk Pushes so that you do not have to do your migration manually. See this article for more information and pricing.
When you push your inventory from one platform to the other, we form a relationship between the item on your Point of Sale and your eCommerce platform that allows the products to "talk" to each other, informing the other platform if there's been a sale (causing a decrement in the inventory count) or if a purchase order has been received (causing an increment in the inventory count). In simple terms, we make a Xerox copy of your product from your Point of Sale (or eCommerce) and send that to the other side (your eCommerce or Point of Sale, respectively). This automatically forms a linking relationship between your products without having to use the Link Report.
Why is Pushing Important?
Pushing is important if you don't want to perform double data entry - meaning entering your product in to both your Point of Sale and eCommerce. Once an item is pushed and has formed that syncing relationship, you no longer will have to manually adjust the inventory on both your Point of Sale and eCommerce when a sale is made - SKU IQ allows for automatic decrements when sales are made - in Real Time! The reverse also works, so if you receive more inventory for a product, the new inventory count will be automatically communicated to the opposing platform.
What do you Mean By Linking (Syncing) Relationship?
A link (also referred to as a linking or syncing relationship) is how we establish the connection between your Point of Sale and eCommerce for any particular item. Forming a syncing relationship is like placing a mirror between your Point of Sale and eCommerce so that the correct inventory quantities are reflected on both sides. Without links, quantity changes will not be communicated between the two. Unlinked products also do not have the ability to sync product attribute data either! So, if you have price syncing turned on, when you update the price for a product on your Source of Truth system, you won't have that update occur on the other side if the product isn't linked.
If you have inventory on both platforms, you should try linking your inventory instead.
Manually Pushing Products
Manually pushing products allows you to pick and choose what items you want to send to the opposing platform. This is handy if you have some items that you sell in-store that you don't necessarily want to sell online.
Please note that not all data will push between platforms. See the Integration Pages for details on what data will sync between your platforms.
For instance, many platforms will not accept images or will only accept certain image types (see this article for details).
Many platforms have limitations on how many variants per item can be accepted (see details here).
How to Filter Your Inventory
When you first connect your Point of Sale and eCommerce platforms to SKU IQ, your In-store and Online items will populate in the Inventory List under the Products page. You can use the Filter By dropdown menu to narrow down what items you see, especially if you have linked items.
Linked items will show up under In-store & Online while items that are only on the Point of Sale
will show up under In-Store Only and items that are only on your eCommerce website will show up under Online Only. No Filter will show all products, including those that don't exist on either platform and only exist on SKU IQ. You can also use the Hide Sold-Out checkbox to only see items that have positive stock quantities.
How to Manually Push Your Inventory
1. Once you've decided what inventory you'd like to push, click the checkboxes next to the items you want to send to the other platform. Make sure that you only push items that exist on one platform to the other. For instance, if you push an item that exists on Shopify (eCommerce) to eCommerce, it will duplicate that item on the website. This is where filtering comes in (see above).
Each page contains 50 items. You can select all 50 by clicking the checkbox at the very top of the list.
You can only push fifty items at a time manually. If you would prefer to push your entire inventory, contact Support in regard to a Bulk Push. We cannot push a certain number of items or specific items in bulk.
2. A black Actions button will appear at the top of the product list. When you click the button, a drop down menu will appear giving you the option to Push to POS or Push to eCommerce. If you are pushing items from your eCommerce site, you will want to select Push to POS (and vice versa).
💡 Tip: You may want to start with one or two products to test with to ensure that you are comfortable with the syncing capabilities and the data that is migrated.
3. Once you have selected Push to POS or Push to eCommerce, a popup will appear letting you know you are about to push a specific number of items to the respective platform.
When you're ready, click Cool, do it!
Each product takes a few minutes to send over to the opposite platform. 50 products will typically take anywhere from 40 to 60 minutes to finish. New products you've pushed can take up to an hour to display on the other platform's dashboard depending on the polling time of that platform. More information about polling times will be available soon.
🚨 During your Free Trial, you are limited to pushing a maximum of 50 products. You will be alerted when you have reached that threshold. Once you have signed up for a paid subscription, there is no longer a limit on how many items you can push. However, only 50 items can be pushed at a time (meaning 50 products per roughly an hour). You cannot do multiple pushes at once. In order to get around the time constraint, you can purchase and schedule a Bulk Push. Please contact Support to schedule a Bulk Push. See this article for pricing information.
5. After your products are pushed, you can view them by going to Products and filtering to In-Store & Online. You'll see both the Point of Sale and eCommerce icons as well as the blue circular icon (AKA the Linked Icon) for the products that have been pushed over. This is how you tell that a product has formed a linking relationship between your Point of Sale and eCommerce platforms.
Automatic Pushing
SKU IQ offers an awesome feature at no additional charge on paid subscriptions where we allow you to enter your products in to one of your platforms and we will automatically send the relevant data over to the other platform. This prevents you from having to go into the SKU IQ dashboard to perform manual pushes when you add new product.
We have two options available for Auto-Pushing:
1. We can push items directly as published items (so that they appear as live on your website or Point of Sale)
2. We can push items as draft or disabled items (so that they do NOT appear as live products on your website or Point of Sale)
The latter option allows you to edit the product that is in draft status before publishing it. This is handy if you are pushing from a Point of Sale that does not like pictures or can't send descriptions over to your eCommerce site.
If you are interested in setting up automatic pushing, please contact Support so that we can help you set that up appropriately.
Troubleshooting Tips:
- Data Formatting
- Do I have to Link All of my Products?
- Troubleshooting Pushing Items
- Common Error Messages When Pushing (coming soon)