Product Cloning

Overview

Synkro provides many powerful methods to copy (clone) products from one of your stores to your other connected stores. Individual products can be cloned, or they can be cloned in bulk. Synkro can also automatically clone products from one “main” store to all connected stores whenever you create a new product in the main store. The following sections will outline all of the different product cloning methods, and provide guidance as to which is the best option for your use-case.

Visual product cloning tool

The visual product cloning tool is great for copying select products from one store to another. This product cloning method is available to all Synkro stores which are subscribed to the Synkro Basic plan or higher.

Visual product cloning tool instructions

Access your list of products from within the Shopify Admin of the store whose products you’d like to clone into another store. Find and select the products which you’d like to clone, then click on the … (More actions) button which appears after you have selected some products. In the list of options which appears, scroll to the bottom of the list and select the option to Perform bulk action on selected products.

Select the products which you’d like to clone, then navigate to the Perform bulk action on selected products admin link

On the next page, you will be shown a few bulk actions which you can perform on the selected products. To clone your products, click on the link which says Choose stores to clone selected products into.

Click on the link which says Choose stores to clone selected products into

Finally, you will see an overview of the products which you are preparing to clone. Scroll to the bottom of this page and click the checkbox beside each of the connected stores which you’d like to clone the selected products into. To start the cloning operation, simply click the Clone button at the very bottom of the page.

Select the destination stores and click Clone

After a few seconds, you will see the products start to appear in your selected destination stores.

Tag-based product cloning

If selecting products and cloning them isn’t an efficient enough method for copying products between your stores, then the tag-based product cloning system will be a better solution. By simply adding one or more *synkro-clone-** tags to your products, you can instruct Synkro which of your connected stores it should clone the product into. There are many ways to add tags to products via Shopify in bulk, which provides a flexible way to copy products over to your other stores quickly. Tag-based cloning is available to merchants subscribed to the Synkro Plus plan or higher.

Tag-based cloning instructions

The Synkro product cloning tag takes the format of “synkro-clone-example”, where “example” is the prefix of your example.myshopify.com URL. How to find my store’s myshopify.com prefix

In the following example, the tag “synkro-clone-acme-home-b2b” is added to the product to indicate to Synkro that it should clone this product into the connected store acme-home-b2b.myshopify.com.

synkro-clone-acme-home-b2b tag indicates to clone product into acme-home-b2b.myshopify.com

Once you click Save on your product, Synkro will quickly recognize the tag and begin cloning the product into the store indicated by your tag immediately. Multiple tags can be added to a product to indicate multiple destination stores. Tags which are added to products via other product ingest methods (CSV product upload, bulk tag editors, etc.) can also trigger the Synkro clone operation.

Automatic product cloning

If your preference is to have products which are created in your “main” store automatically copied to your connected stores — without adding any tags — then the Synkro auto-clone tool is perfect for you. Navigate into the Synkro settings from your “main” store to the Product cloning tab, and find the Automatically clone newly created products in this store to other stores setting.

Choose an automatic product cloning option and click Save

This setting offers three options which control where newly created products are automatically cloned:

• Don’t automatically clone products (:none) — the default. Newly created products are not automatically cloned anywhere. You can still clone products manually with the visual or tag-based tools.
• Clone all newly created products (:all) — every product created in this store is automatically cloned into all of your connected stores.
• Clone products only to stores with a matching product subscription (:product_subscriptions) — newly created products are cloned only into connected stores that have a product subscription matching the product. This lets each destination store control exactly which of your products it receives.

Choose the option that fits your workflow and click Save. The next time you create a new product in this store, Synkro will immediately begin cloning it according to your selected option. Automatic product cloning is available to merchants subscribed to the Synkro Plus plan or higher.

Parent and child products

Every product cloned by Synkro is linked to the product it was copied from. The original product is the parent, and each copy in another store is a child. The same link is made at the variant level, so each child variant knows which parent variant it came from.

This relationship is set automatically during cloning, no matter which cloning method you use. The store you clone from becomes the parent store for those products, and each destination store receives a child product linked back to the original.

The relationship also sets the direction of syncing. Product properties such as titles, descriptions, images, and prices sync from the parent to its children: change the parent product and Synkro updates every child. Changes made to a child product are not synced back to the parent, so treat the parent store as the place to edit products. Child-to-parent product syncing is available as an option on the Synkro Pro plan.

Inventory levels are handled separately from product properties. Their direction is set by your location connections, which can be one-way or two-way, regardless of which product is the parent.

The parent-child relationship is what price rules act on. A price rule attached to a child product converts the parent’s price each time it syncs to that child, which is why price rule types refer to the “parent price”, “parent cost”, and so on.

Assigning or changing a parent product

If a product was created separately in each store instead of being cloned, or it is linked to the wrong parent, you can set its parent product manually. This is done from the child store.

Open Synkro from the Shopify Admin of the child store, then go to Products → Manage products and click on the title of the product. In the Sync relationships section, the Parent product column shows the product’s current parent, along with these buttons:

• Assign parent (or Change parent, if the product already has one) opens the parent product search.
• Break connection removes the link between the product and its parent, including the links between their variants. After confirming, the product will no longer receive updates from its parent.

To assign a parent product:

1. Choose the parent store. Select the connected store which contains the parent product. The store which is set to assume the parent role is selected by default.
2. Search for the parent product. Choose whether to search by SKU, Barcode or Title, enter your search, and click Search. Searches must be an exact match of the full value, since partial matches are not returned. SKUs and barcodes are case-sensitive, while titles are not. Click the link icon beside a result to open that product in the parent store’s Shopify Admin.
3. Select the product and click Assign parent. This opens an overview of how the product’s variants will be linked to the parent product’s variants.
4. Review the variant links. Synkro automatically links each variant to the parent variant with the same SKU (or barcode, if your stores sync by barcode). A summary such as “Found 10/15 variants with matching SKU” shows how many variants are linked. The remaining variants are listed with the reason no match was found, and a dropdown to link each of them to a parent variant manually. The summary updates as you link variants. Each parent variant can only be linked to one child variant, so parent variants which are already linked are removed from the other dropdowns. Use Go back to search to choose a different parent product.
5. Click Assign parent to save the links. Variants which are left unlinked won’t receive updates from the parent product.