Several best practices should be kept in mind regarding loading item catalogs. Several Spark Shipping vendors have very large item catalogs. The more items in a catalog, the longer it will take to sync to the product catalog and your shopping cart (your website).
Would you like me to push each item that I want? Can't Spark Shipping just push all of them to my website for me?
Each customer is responsible for pushing each item to their store. Spark Shipping will only push some vendor items to their store because this is a bad practice that can result in problems and the customer's site quickly becoming a mess. The few times we have tried this, the customers have yet to be successful. A few reasons Spark cannot do this are shown below.
- Pushing the entire vendor catalog could quickly push you over your SKU allowance for your plan, causing your account to quit syncing.
- Customers would end up with many items on their site and have thousands of items to look through and clean up.
- Most customers focus on specific products and don't want everything the vendor has
- Platforms like Shopify put throttling limits on how many items can be created in their API; they will only allow so many items to push once before they start erroring out.
Note: If you have multiple sites and one site is set with all of the items pushed, Spark Shipping can clone those items over to another site that you have once the first site is established.
Take it slow
Once the product catalog has loaded completely, a common mistake that some clients make is attempting to push items simultaneously. We suggest you first push some test items and then in groups or phases. Following these practices will help ensure you have a smooth experience.
- Could you push just a few items to your store first as a test? Then check your shopping cart (your website) and ensure all of the item information looks good, has photos, and all the critical information such as attributes, price, dimensions, etc.
- Then, push what you sell in logical groups; examples include pushing by brand name, type of product, or related products.
Example: If you sell car parts, push the GM brand before pushing Everstart.