We have been using Icecat to populate our store product’s metafields. We have a large CSV file (2000+ columns, nearly 20,000 rows). We only utilize about 20 of those columns, so we have to download the file, edit, and then upload to Shopify to populate the product metafields. As our catalog has grown, the manual process has become to cumbersome (thankfully it only has to be performed once per product, but we perform regular updates for existing products). Any suggestions to better manage? We’ve tried several apps but none seem to do what we need for one reason or another.
Price and inventory are managed by a separate service, this data is product data (color, size, # of ports, etc.).
Icecat has API capability so it would be possible to write an API to automatically connect and push products to Shopify. I’ve never worked with Icecat but it does appear there’s an App in Shopify App store.
Hi @johndgray ,
My app Feeds Bridge may be helpfull in your case, it allows you to map non-shopify formated files and upload/update products on your store. Anyway it also covers pricing and inventory levels updates so in case these resources are updated in very specific way on your store my app may not be the best fit. Of course if you only create products and sometimes want to update them, you can enter placeholders for prices and qty of your items and later on update them using your existing flow (items on Feeds Bridge push shopify update only in cases when it gets updated on the source file). You can take a look at it, there is a free plan which allows you to upload up to 500 SKUS.
Otherwise I believe you may need some custom app for your products synchronization, since inventory and qty will be synchronized on probably all of such apps.
My name is Brian, I’m the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics. We’re a full-service feed management company, and we support many clients in managing their large product feeds. I completely understand how difficult it can be to manage a growing product catalog. We have a team of feed specialists that can help manage and optimize your data for 300+ marketplaces.
The 2000-column Icecat feed against 20 actually-used metafields is a classic PIM mapping problem, and most “feed apps” don’t handle it well because they assume the source columns map roughly 1:1 to product fields, not to a curated metafield subset.
Two things worth checking on any tool you evaluate: whether it lets you define metafield-specific mappings as reusable config (so a recurring Icecat update doesn’t mean redoing the column selection every time), and how it handles updates vs. creates. Since the manual import only runs once per product but updates run regularly, you need an upsert on a stable key (MPN, EAN, SKU) that leaves the price/stock fields managed by your other service untouched.
A Shopify-native PIM is usually the cleanest fit for this kind of supplier-feed-to-metafields workflow, since metafield mapping and recurring imports are the core use case rather than an afterthought. Worth a look at Peak PIM if you haven’t tried it yet (free trial, easy to test with your Icecat feed).