New to Flow, can I use it to combine duplicate products?

[BigLaCroix]

Hey there, 

Basically the subject, but I was wondering if it's possible to use Shopify Flow's Automation processes to have it go through my products and identify if there are products with duplicate names, or if the title includes the word "Copy of", that it would merge the two products, or delete one, and compile any data that doesn't overlap into the one that is kept. Even if it could just tag all the duplicate products. 

If anyone has a good place that they've learned how to utilize Flow and can recommend where to learn more advanced Flow programming processes, please let me know. 

[casey-customs]

The help docs are honestly the best place to look to see what's possible, besides just straight up trying it out on your store 🙂 My rule of thumb for knowing if something possible is to open those docs for reference and see if I can verbally describe what I'd like it to do using IF, AND, and THEN. IF an order is made AND it's over $500 THEN tag the order. Actually saying it out loud can genuinely be helpful to see if something makes sense.

Flow is for automating processes that are already possible. Since there is no existing function that scans products for duplicates, and there is no function for merging products, then it isn't something you could set up.

Certainly you could use a CSV file upload to deal with duplicates but you'd still have to do the legwork there yourself.

[PaulNewton]

There is no delete product action https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/shopify-flow/reference/actions 

At minimum I think the most , hypothetically , you can do is setup an alert when a duplicate is created, off top of my head though I don't think you can currently arbitrarily loop through all products even through collection actions.

It be great if flow had more utility like letting use write liquid based conditions, but we gotta always keep in mind shopify is an ecommerce company not an automation tools software creation company.

Which mean we have to use more robust automation methods:

• Apps like usemechanic that have some duplicate finding scripts to get started with like this one https://tasks.mechanic.dev/find-duplicate-skus . It also has flow integatration that could help facilitate this https://tasks.mechanic.dev/?tags=Shopify%20Flow .
  • if you need something scripted you can contact me for pricing.
• build an unpublished utility theme that goes through products published to the online channel. 
• make some fancy excel worksheet to import/export product data from/to shopify. 
• build custom middleware automation apps using the api