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      Managing Products

      Make your products available to your customers

      This article covers key points you need to know when managing your products with Nyla and Shopify. 

      What's on Nyla vs Shopify? 

      When discussing how to manage products in Nyla, it's important to establish the interaction between Shopify and Nyla. Read a recap on this here. 
      Nyla pulls product data from Shopify to display on your site by referencing sources like source product or source collection. Your actual product pages (e.g the page that a customer visits when they click on your site) are managed on Nyla.
      Product data is managed on Shopify and then referenced by Nyla on your pages. This includes information such as, inventory and availability, Pricing and discounts, Product options and variants, Product images...and much more. See here for product properties available on Nyla.
      Sections below the fold on your product pages can be managed on Nyla, with content being entered by overrides or managed using metafields on Shopify according to whatever is best for your brand.
      For example, larger catalogues might find it optimal to not have overrides to manage on Nyla pages, and simply manage all data via metafields, or properties available from Shopify in order to manage their product pages at scale, whereas smaller brands might choose to have more content-heavy, more tailored product pages with content added on a per page basis via override in Nyla. 
      In summary: 
      • You manage your product data on Shopify
      • On Nyla you reference your product data via Sources and Properties on pages, using sections and templates to create the experiences that you want for your customers. 

      How to launch products on Nyla

      In order to launch a product on Nyla: 

      1. Add the product on Shopify, and make it available to Nyla. Remember to set up all required information on Shopify as per your product setup (e.g product images, description, metafields, adding it to the collections it should show up in and so on). 
      2. Create the product page (or the page where you are featuring your product, such as a landing page) on Nyla. Just like with any other page, once you are ready, you need to publish your changes to make sure that they show up on your site. 

      Making a Shopify product available on Nyla

      In order for a product to be available on Nyla, it needs to configured as follows in Shopify:
      • Product Status needs to be set to Active on Shopify (not in Draft or Archived state)
      • The product needs to be made available on the Nyla and the Online Store Sales Channels in Shopify (41 second screen recording here)
      • After you have made those changes you should refresh the data on the relevant page(s) on Nyla, or rebuild your site 
      Once your product meets the criteria above, it will be available within Nyla. If any of the above are not true, then your product will not appear within the Nyla editor or your live site. 
      If you want your product to appear in Collections on Nyla, make sure that you add it to the relevant collections in Shopify and that you publish those pages after doing so. 
       
      Creating a product page (PDP) on Nyla

      After having set up your product in Shopify and populating all the required data there and then making it available to Nyla, you'll need to add your product page in Nyla. In order to do this: 

      1. Create a page within the Products folder in Nyla, using the appropriate page template for that product (if applicable). Note that is is best practice not to unlink your section templates above the fold or your page templates unless needed in order to enable better future facing management. 
      2. (Best practice) add your product as the page source. If you aren't using page source for a reason specific to you, then set the source product in the relevant place(s) on your page.   
      3. (As applicable) add content to your PDP using overrides, or by populating metafields/similar data in Shopify as per your PDP setup.
      4. (As applicable) set up features such as: 
        1. Swatches (to ensure that your colour product options show with the correct swatches)
        2. Image filtering (to allow your images to filter based on a selected product option value, like colour)
        3. Product option defaults (to set a specific default variant for your product when customers land on the page)
      5. Once you are done, save and publish your page for it to appear live on your site. 

      Helpful resources: 

      Best practices for updating an existing product on Shopify

      In order to make changes to your product data, you should do so on Shopify. This includes things like updating product images, product description, price and so on (this is the case for anything that is referenced as a property on Nyla). 

      When making minor changes, you can normally do this directly on Shopify without any issues, however when making more sweeping changes, we recommend to make a backup of your product first, and then make your changes to your current product. 

      Our recommended process is as follows: 

      1. Make a backup of your product by duplicating your existing product in Shopify. End the title and handle of the duplicate with "old". Don't publish the duplicate, and don't set it as available on any channels -- this is purely a backup in case you want to refer to it later
      2. Next, make the changes to your original product in Shopify
      3. After having made your changes, make sure to publish them on Nyla if they aren't included in automated publishes
      By updating your existing product in Shopify rather than creating a new one, you'll keep your product and variant IDs intact in Shopify.
      This is helpful because third party review platforms, feed providers and advertising / marketing platforms typically use the Shopify product and variant IDs to keep track of the product, and if those change, it could effect the way those platforms work and/or require you to have to change configuration.
      It is best to avoid third party impact by continuing to leverage your existing Shopify product records, even while you may be making major changes to the content of their pages.

      Ensuring products are not discoverable on your Nyla site

      On some occasions (such as when you want to remove a product from sale, or if you want to create a test product), you might want to have a product on your Nyla site, but for it to be undiscoverable unless you navigate directly to that URL. 
      Take the following steps to safely remove a product everywhere on your site other than for historical order information or if somebody navigates directly to the URL:
      In Nyla: 
      • Set the product page in Nyla to be Hidden (this will exclude the page from being indexed by search engines)
      • Remove any manual links to the product

      In Shopify: 

      • Add the nyla_hidden tag to the product in Shopify (this will exclude the product from appearing in Algolia search).
      • Remove the product from all Collections in Shopify, including all automated collections
        • Hint: it’s easy to configure your Shopify Collections to always exclude products that have a certain tag set. For example, if you add the tag collection-hidden to a product, and then go into a collection and set it to Exclude products with the tag collection-hidden, the product will never appear in that collection.

      When removing a product, if you wanted to, you could change the styling or messaging on your product page to make it clear that it is no longer for sale and indicating customers elsewhere. 

      Remember to force a rebuild your site after making these changes.

      Removing products from Nyla

      When removing product from Nyla, we recommend to not Archive or Delete the product in Shopify. This is because if you Archive a product, delete it, or unpublish a product from the Nyla sales channel, its information will not be able to be displayed on the Order Detail page. Therefore when customers, are looking at their previous orders, they will not see the product that they expect. 
      This means that when removing a product from your site, you shouldn't delete the product, but rather ensure that its information is hidden. Therefore, we recommend taking the following steps: 
      1. Ensure the product is not discoverable on your site, by following the steps outlined here
      2. Remove links and source product references: In order to avoid broken links or other undesired behaviour, it is important to ensure that when removing products from Shopify that you also remove all references in Nyla set with that product as its source.
      3. Exclude from third party feeds and apps: Check whether you have any native Shopify apps in place that retrieve product information directly from Shopify such as marketing or advertising platforms (like Facebook or Google) or on-site product recommendation apps (like Nosto). Most such apps can be easily configured to exclude products directly from their admin area, but if not, you can contact the app provider for assistance — excluding product information is a common request and they’ll be able to assist.