You can schedule imports and updates to your Shopify store using Matrixify: Bulk Import Export Update app.
For the sake of example, in this tutorial, you will schedule Product price update twice per week – to have different prices during the weekend and working week. It will be done following these steps:
- Prepare import files.
- Schedule import with repeating.
- Many ways to Update prices:
- By Variant SKU
- By Product Handle
- By ID and Variant ID
- By Variant Barcode
- By Handle and Options
- and other combinations of identification fields…
1. Prepare import files
Export all products and variants (or, use filter and export only those that need to be updated regularly).
Then leave only the data that is relevant to the price update: ID, Handle, Variant ID and Variant Price.
These are recommended columns to use for updating prices if you are exporting data from the app anyway. In this case, you have access to the IDs which are great unique identifiers.
Let this be a file for working day prices – so save it to the file “working day prices.xlsx”.
Create the second file with the same products and variants, but different prices – for the weekend. Save the file with the different name “weekend prices.xlsx”:
2. Schedule import with repeating
Now go to the App and upload the first file with weekend prices. Click Options section. Every Friday morning I would like to set Weekend prices.
There is a checkbox “Schedule import at” – switch it on and set the first date and time when import should be processed.
Then mark the next checkbox “Repeat every” as well and set the period of how often this file should be imported. If it is needed once per week, then set every 1 weeks. Then choose how many times to run this import – I am choosing to run until canceled. The import will repeat at the same time every week.
When all options are set, press “Schedule” button.
Similarly, set the options for the second file – the working day prices. Set it to run every Monday morning at 1am:
Now Scheduled imports are visible in the All Jobs section:
3. Many ways to update prices
By Variant SKU
Typically, your supplier provides you with prices for each SKU number.
That is the only thing you need to update them.
Minimum required columns:
– Variant SKU
– Variant Price
Since Shopify doesn’t force the SKU to be unique, the app will update all product variants that match imported SKU numbers.
If different products in the store have the same SKUs then you would also need to add Handle column together with Variant SKU to identify the specific Product/Variant.
By Product Handle
If you just have your product Handles, and you have no product variants (meaning each product has one variant), then you can do an update like this.
Minimum required columns:
– Handle
– Variant Price
By ID and Variant ID
This is the fastest way to update prices – if you have enormous volumes of products to update. That’s because ID is the most precise reference to the item in Shopify.
Minimum required columns:
– ID
– Variant ID
– Variant Price
You can also update prices only by Variant ID but it will be a longer import. It is suggested where possible to also use the whole product ID column.
By Barcode
What if you don’t have SKU numbers, but you have the Barcodes? No problem – you can identify product variants by Barcode, too.
Minimum required columns:
– Variant Barcode
– Variant Price
Since Shopify doesn’t force the Barcode to be unique, the app will update all product variants that match imported Barcode numbers.
If different products in the store have the same Barcode then you would also need to add Handle column together with Variant Barcode to identify the specific Product/Variant.
By Handle and Options
This might seem crazy, but you can update prices by variant options. For example, change the prices by a Color or Size, or any other option combinations your products have.
Minimum required columns:
– Handle
– Option1 Name
– Option1 Value
– Option2 Name
– Option2 Value
– Option3 Name
– Option3 Value
– Variant Price
Good to know
- If there is a need to schedule import just once, use only Schedule import at section providing the date and time.
- There are many variations of how often import can be repeated, for example, every 2 days, every 3 months (quarterly), every 6 months (semi-annually) etc.
- Scheduled import can be repeated 2 – 99 times, or infinitely. It starts at 2 times because if you want it to repeat just one time then you don’t need to repeat it – you just schedule it to run once.
- You can schedule Import and Export of products, collections, customers, discounts, orders, and pages, and any combination of those.
- Scheduled imports and exports can be canceled in the “All Jobs” page in case they are not needed anymore.
