Note and Forewarning on product overwrites and adding products to Shopify yourself

The Catalyst product database is a large project managed by an entire team of data entry specialists, product merchandisers, vendor relationship managers, web apps, database managers, web developers, and your Ecommerce Administrator. 

Reminder - we are constantly evaluating 'Did Not Match' Reports and adding new products to Catalyst. Typically, if you are able to wait a few months, many of your products from your original Did Not Match Report will be in your catalog on subsequent updates. 

If you would like to add products to your Shopify website you may do so at your own risk.

We do require that any store wishing to manage their own Shopify site sign a release before accessing the product catalog database. 

Changes to any existing products, including, but not limited to: variants, titles, UPCs, handles, descriptions or images in your Shopify site may result in any of the following:

• Broken connection to Catalyst
• Incorrect product/image updates
• Incoherent categorization on your website

Additionally, product update imports in Shopify work using the Shopify product handles. If you add a product to Shopify you will likely not be using the same product handle that is used in Catalyst. Therefore, you risk creating duplicates of the same product in your Shopify site upon future imports.

For these reasons, we strongly recommend you allow Catalyst and our data entry team to keep building out your online merchandising using consistent monthly imports. 

Our recommendation is that any data entry done by the store should be reserved to only products such as live animals or live plants.