How to track processing status of our products

Shopify Discussion
1

Hello, we’re looking for a solution to track the current status of our new products during processing stage.

Here’s an overview of our process:

  1. When a new product comes in, we enter it on Shopify. Status is still Draft because we still have to process it.
  2. Before the product is set to Active, we need to complete the following:
    • Take photos of the product.
    • Write blurb/description of the product.
    • Have the blurb/description approved by the manager.
  3. Once the product has photos and approved description, we can now set the product to Active.

Note that working on photos and description is not sequential. It means that they can be performed at the same time. For example, you don’t need the photos before writing the description.

Here are some solutions I’ve already thought about:

  • Use tags in Shopify. Sample tags could be “for photo” and “for blurb”.
    • Pro: Simple. Already within Shopify. Easily searched through the standard Tagged With filter.
    • Con: You need to manually remove the tags once they’re done.
  • Use metafields in Shopify.
    • Pro: There are several field types, like checkbox or dropdown. Can be flexible in terms of implementation.
    • Con: Metafields are not included in the product search filter.
  • Use an external system.
    • Pro: Much more flexible than what you can do within Shopify.
    • Con: We would need to retype fields like product title. Extra steps in accessing it since it is not within Shopify.

Can you suggest other potential solutions? I’m not sure if there’s a Shopify app that could fulfill our requirements. I tried looking but I think I’m not using the correct keywords.

Thank you for your help!

2

Hey there @ellekaie ,

Are you looking to basically generate reports of products in Draft status at different stages of the process?

If this is what you’re looking for, our app EZ Exporter might be able to help with this and you can have a CSV or Excel file containing only products matching your conditions sent out automatically as an email attachment to your team.

For example, you can create a report with these filters:

  • Status: Draft
  • Image URLs is not blank
  • Body HTML (description) is not blank
  • Tags contains approved

So the above would export products that are ready to be set to Active.

You can create multiple reports as well for the different stages of the process. For example, you can create separate ones for “Draft Products without Images and Description”, “Draft Products with Images Only”, “Draft Products with Description Only (Unapproved)”, “Draft Products with Approved Description”, etc.

You can then schedule each of these reports to run automatically and sent via email (or to Google Sheets (you can have multiple sheets for the different processing status), Dropbox, etc.).

If you use Google Sheets, it could work nicely as you’ll just have a single spreadsheet with multiple sheets/tabs for the different stages of the process and our app can just continuously push to these sheets/tabs periodically to keep it up to date (you can schedule an export as frequently as every 15 minutes with our app).

Our app won’t be able to automatically set the Product status to “Active”, however, since it’s designed just for exporting data.

1 Like
3

Thank you for your suggestion, but this would seem to add extra layers of complication to a process. But perhaps other users who have the same process requirements as ours may find your app useful.

4

I also reached out to Shopify Support and here’s their answer:

I completely understand how important this is for you to streamline your process. The steps you have already outlined using tags would be the best solution I could think of too. There would be no third party apps that integrate with Shopify that would allow you to do task management in this way.> > As you also mentioned you could use a third party app organisation app like Trello but this would require some repeated data entry. Regardless of any method you choose you would need to manually add a product to a list and then action the tasks of writing and photography when they are completed. Considering this the most time efficient way would seem to be the steps you outlined using tags. This would have the benefit of just needing to add two tags to every new product and having the tags removed upon completion.> > You may consider hiring a Shopify Expert who might be able to build you out a bespoke solution, but that being said I do not any solution would offer any efficiency over the steps you already mentioned.