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Link Products

Step 3 of 4 - Link existing products between Shopify and your POS to ensure success.

Updated over 2 months ago

Overview

Mortar automatically reviews each Shopify product to find a unique link to a product in your POS. Complete the setup by doing the following:

  • Review the linking results

  • Fix priority products

  • Save the links and products to Mortar

Tip: If you have no products in Shopify, you can skip this step.
If you only have test products in Shopify, press Save to skip.

Get started

You can access the Products page in two ways:

  • Sidebar menu - in the sidebar menu: Mortar > Products

  • Setup guide - Open the Intercom Task list, select Link products, and press Review.

Product linking

Mortar imports all active and draft products to create links. Depending on the number of products you have between Shopify and your POS, this process can take some time to complete. Status dials track your progress onscreen. As soon as the process is complete, your results will be displayed, and you will receive a copy of the results by email.

Linking progress

Links are created only between unique matches (1 Shopify Variant to 1 POS product). The more 1-to-1 matches you have, the better.

Learn more: How Mortar links Shopify products to your POS platform

Product link results

Mortar organizes your link results into the following essential tabs: Linked, Unlinked, and Priority.

Tip: Select the Priority tab to focus on the most critical unlinked Shopify products, those with inventory!

Priority products

Unlinked products with inventory available on Shopify are the most at risk of being oversold. To help you decide which unlinked product to focus on first, Mortar provides this list of these high-risk products that need your help to make a 1-to-1 link with a product in your inventory source.

Unlinked products

Variants that do not uniquely match a product in your inventory source require further action. There are four causes for an unlinked Shopify product.

  • Non-unique - Multiple products on Shopify or your inventory source have the same SKU or Barcode ID

  • Not found - Mortar wasn't able to find any product in your inventory source with a matching SKU or Barcode ID

  • No data - A SKU or Barcode was not present on Shopify

  • Conflicting matches - Multiple IDs on an existing product have resulted in more than one unique match to a product or multiple products.

Linked products

Variants that uniquely match a product in your inventory source require no further action.

Export link results

If you have an extensive list of products, exporting your link results to a spreadsheet can help you stay organized or split the workload between team members.

Fixing unlinked products

Fixing non-unique

Multiple products sharing the same SKU or Barcode in Shopify or your POS can only be linked once you create a 1-to-1 relationship for each product.

There are two options to create unique links for each product:

  1. Update the SKU or Barcode for each product to ensure they are all unique.

  2. Archive redundant products.

Step-by-step Learn more: Fixing "Non-unique" Product Links.

Fixing not found

Products that exist on Shopify but cannot be found in your POS happen for one of the following reasons:

  1. A product doesn't exist or was archived in the POS

  2. The product SKU or Barcode is different in the POS

In each case, you need to either update the existing product with a unique SKU or Barcode or create a new product in your POS if it does not exist.

Step-by-step Learn more: Fixing "Not found" Product Links.

Fixing no data

This means that no SKU or Barcode exists for the variant in Shopify. A product SKU or Barcode in Shopify is required to link to your POS.

The most straightforward fix is to copy the unique ID your POS generates for each product and transfer this to the Shopify SKU field.

POS

Copy POS Unique ID to Shopify SKU

Lightspeed R-series

System ID

Lightspeed X-series

Custom or SKU

Heartland Retail

Item

Step-by-step Learn more: Fixing "No data" Product Links.

Fixing Conflicting matches

A product with multiple IDs, each of which has a unique match to more than one product on Shopify or in your POS. Like non-unique products, conflicting matches need to be resolved so you have a 1-to-1 relationship for each product.

There are two options to create unique links for each product:

  1. Update the SKU or Barcode for each product to ensure they are all unique.

  2. Archive redundant products.

Step-by-step Learn more: Fixing "Conflicting matches"

Reimport linking

After making as many product updates or changes as needed, press the Reimport button to process the updates and display your new results.

Save all links

The final step in linking your products is to save the links.

Press the Save button to commit your links to Mortar and set your unlinked Shopify products to draft. This can take some time, depending on how many products you have.

When this process is completed, you will receive an email with instructions to activate Mortar.

Don't worry if they aren't perfect; unlinked products will be set to draft status in Shopify so you can continue improving your links after Mortar is activated. Mortar will always try to link new products from your POS to products on Shopify.


Next Steps

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