Schedule import to Shopify from FTP server

You are in this situation that you have your Master Data auto-refreshed regularly and is available on your FTP server.

So you need to import it every day to Shopify from that FTP server.

This is how you do it with the Matrixify app.

Steps to schedule import from FTP

1. Create import from FTP.
2. Press the “Upload from URL” button.
3. Verify that the app has found the file and sees its contents.
4. Select what to do with the imported file in your server
5. Schedule to import it at regular intervals.

1. Create import from FTP

There are two main ways to create an import from your FTP server.

You can create an import from the full URL to the file and in the URL list, your user credentials, or you can save your server in Matrixify so that you do not need to fill in username and password each time.

Option 1 – Save server in Matrixify and create an import from it

You can open the Matrixify app and head into the Settings page.
On this page, you can find the section “Servers” and there you can create a new server to save your user credentials.
Find more details about how to set up a server in Matrixify “Set up Servers for importing files to Shopify” tutorial.

Then head back to the Matrixify Home page and in the “Import” section select your server from the Server drop-down menu.

Fill the path to the file starting from the root directory.

Option 2 – Import from full URL

When importing from the full URL you would need to each time list username and password in the URL.
The app would still not display the password anywhere in the app after the import file is uploaded.

For the sake of example, let’s assume that your server details are:

• FTP server address is: ftp.my-data-server.com
• FTP user name is: master
• FTP server password is: secure123
• File is in the directory: /data
• File name is: Shopify-Import-Demo.xlsx

Then the URL to access the file on that server is the following:

ftp://master:[email protected]/data/Shopify-Import-Demo.xlsx

Universally, you construct your FTP URL in the following form:

ftp://user:[email protected]/path/to/file.xlsx

Open the Matrixify app, in the Home page find the “Import” section, select to upload from “Full URL” and paste URL to your file.

2. Press the “Upload from URL” button

This will open a new page with your import.

Wait for the app to download the file for the first time, and let it analyze it (or fix any issues if it says that the URL was not correct).

Once the app will have analyzed the file you will be able to set up options and see more details about your file.
Make sure that the app correctly recognizes data that you are importing and count of items in your file.

3. Verify that the app has found the file and sees its contents

If everything will connect as expected, you should see that the file got uploaded and the app will analyze its contents.

The successful result should similar to this:

If you just want to import it right away, you can press the Import button and it will start the import. Maybe it’s even the right thing to do for the first time – to test if your file is prepared well so that it imports without any issues.

But if you want to schedule repeated import from that file or move/delete uploaded file from your server once its imported, then…

4. Select what to do with the imported file in your server

First, in the Options, we need to set up the option “What to do with remote SFTP file when importing?”

Here you can choose one of three settings:

• Do nothing – nothing will happen to your file in your server it will just get import and stay there.
• Delete that file on SFTP server – the app will delete each file it imports.
  This is useful if you do not need the file after import, but have repeated import set up for this file and do not wish for next import to import again the same file.
• Move file to directory by Import status – moves the file to a different directory based on its current status within this batch job.
  If you have automation set up in your server that should pick up what happened with the file or just wish to be in control of your files then this is an option to select.
  In this option you can set up to move file by the following conditions:
  • In Progress – the app will move the file to a specific directory once the app starts to import it.
  • Finished – the file will get moved to the specific folder once it finishes importing (the file will be moved here even if there are some failed items inside the import, because in principle that import was finished).
  • Failed – move the file if the whole job file fails to import (in most cases, when the template format is not recognized at all).
  • Cancelled – move the file if that import job was cancelled.All 4 fields will be filled by default directories, but you can edit these values to move your file to different folders.
    You do not need to fill full URL with credentials just path to the directory.

5. Schedule to import it at regular intervals

In the Options section, you can set up various options for your import.

Then set up the checkboxes for regular import and set the time when to import, and when to repeat, at what intervals.

For example, this will import every day at 02:15 starting from the day of import:

The app will re-download the fresh file each time it will do the new auto-repeated import.

Now, press the “Schedule” button, and you are all set.

Good to know

• If the user is e-mail address then replace the “@” symbol with “%40”.
• If the password contains # or @ symbol then please create such password which doesn’t contain those symbols as those are special characters for the URL and will cause confusions.
• FTP over TLS – at first we try to connect using TLS encryption. If it doesn’t succeed, then we try without the TLS.
• You are free to close the app as the import is happening on our servers, you can always come back to the job by clicking on this job in the app Home page (if it’s within last 5 jobs) or in All Jobs page.
• You can import from any kinds of URLs that directly access the file.
• If you need to see the historical results of those scheduled and repeated imports, press the “All Jobs” button in the app Home page to see all your Imports and Exports.
  You can also cancel your repeated imports from there.
• You can point to any of file types that are supported by Matrixify.
• Use the same process to import files from Dropbox and from Google Drive.
• Read how you can set up the app to monitor the whole FTP folder and automatically batch import any files that you upload to it.