Product Subscriptions

Overview

Synkro’s Product Subscription system gives you precise control over which products flow from one store into another. A subscribing store defines a subscription to a source store, optionally narrowing it to a subset of the source store’s catalog using rules. Whenever a qualifying product in the source store is created, Synkro automatically clones that product into the subscribing store.

This is ideal when a store should carry only a curated slice of another store’s catalog — for example a B2B store that only stocks a certain vendor’s products, or a dropship seller that only wants a specific set of products from a supplier.

Product subscriptions are available to merchants on the Synkro Plus plan or higher.

Key concepts

• Source store — the store that products originate from. This is the store you are subscribing to. It can be any of your Synkro-connected stores, or a connected dropship supplier store.
• Subscribing store — the store that receives the products. Subscriptions are created from within this store, which becomes the destination for the cloned products.
• Product subscription — a link from a source store to the subscribing store, plus an optional set of rules that determines which of the source store’s products are eligible.
• Rules — optional filters (based on properties like vendor, SKU, tags, price, or metafields) that a source-store product must match to be included in the subscription. A subscription with no rules includes every product in the source store.

When a product is pushed into a subscribing store, Synkro creates a “child” copy that is linked back to the original “parent” product. Future edits to the parent product continue to sync down to the child. This is the same relationship created by Product Cloning.

How products are pushed into a subscribing store

There are two ways for a product to be pushed from a source store into the stores subscribed to it. In both cases, a product is only pushed to a subscribing store if it satisfies that subscription’s rules, and Synkro skips the clone if the subscribing store already has a cloned copy of the product.

1. The synkro-publish tag

When the source store adds the tag synkro-publish to a product, Synkro looks up every subscription whose source is that store, checks the product against each subscription’s rules, and clones the product into each subscribing store where it qualifies.

Because this is tag-driven, you can publish products in bulk using any of Shopify’s tag-editing methods (bulk tag editor, CSV import, third-party tag apps, etc.), which makes it easy to control exactly which products go out to your subscribing stores.

2. Automatic Product Cloning (set to product subscriptions)

Synkro’s Automatic Product Cloning system can also drive subscriptions. When a source store sets its automatic cloning option to Clone products only to stores with a matching product subscription, every newly created product in that store is automatically pushed into any subscribing store whose subscription rules the product matches — without needing to add the synkro-publish tag manually.

This is the best option when you want new products to flow into your subscribing stores automatically as you create them. See the Product Cloning documentation for the full list of automatic cloning options.

Creating a product subscription

Product subscriptions are created from within the store that should receive products (the subscribing store):

1. Open the Synkro app in your subscribing store and navigate to Settings > Product subscriptions.
2. Click Create new product subscription.
3. Select the source store you want to subscribe to. This can be any of your Synkro-connected stores or a connected dropship supplier store.
4. (Optional) Add one or more rules to limit which of the source store’s products are eligible. Leave the rules empty to subscribe to all products in the source store.
5. (Optional) Give the subscription a name to describe its purpose.
6. Click Save.

Once saved, the subscription is active. Qualifying products will be pushed into the subscribing store whenever they are published in the source store via either mechanism described above.

Subscription rules

Rules narrow a subscription down to a subset of the source store’s products. Each rule has a type (the product property to check), a relation (how to compare it), and a value. A product must pass all of a subscription’s rules to qualify — so adding more rules makes a subscription more specific.

Rules can be based on product properties including:

• Vendor (and the vendor of the parent product)
• SKU
• Tags
• Price (and compare-at price)
• Whether inventory is tracked
• Product metafields and variant metafields (see Metafield rules below)

For example, a rule of Vendor is equal to Acme limits the subscription to products from the vendor “Acme”. Combine multiple rules to express more precise conditions — for instance, products from a specific vendor and priced above a certain amount.

Metafield rules

Rules can also check the value of one of the source product’s metafields. Choose Product metafield or Variant metafield as the rule type, then enter the metafield’s namespace and key separated by a period, such as custom.material. The namespace and key can only contain letters, numbers, underscores (_) and hyphens (-).

For example, a rule of Product metafield custom.material, Contains, Cotton limits the subscription to products whose custom.material metafield contains “Cotton”.

Metafield syncing must be turned on for the source store. Synkro checks a rule against the metafields it has loaded for the product, and it only loads them when the Metafields property is enabled in the source store’s sync settings.

Supported metafield types

Metafield rules work with these metafield types:

• Single line text, multi-line text, URL, color, date, date and time, language, ID and true or false (boolean)
• Integer and decimal numbers
• Lists of single line text, URLs, colors, dates, dates and times, integers or decimals

Other types, such as JSON, money, rating, dimension, weight, volume and reference metafields (product, variant, file, metaobject and so on), aren’t supported. A product never matches a rule on an unsupported metafield.

How metafield values are compared

• Missing metafields don’t match. If the product doesn’t have the metafield, or its value is empty, the rule fails. This applies to every relation, including negative ones like Is not equal to and Does not contain.
• Numbers are compared by value. For integer and decimal metafields, Greater than, Less than, Greater than or equal to and Less than or equal to compare the numbers, and Is equal to treats 10 and 10.0 as equal. These numeric relations need a number as the rule’s value, and they never match metafields of other types.
• True or false metafields are compared as the text true or false, for example Is equal to true.
• List metafields are checked item by item. A rule passes if any item in the list passes it. Negative relations (Is not equal to, Does not contain, Is not one of and so on) pass only if no item matches. Because Is equal to compares one item at a time, it can’t match the whole list.
• Variant metafield rules check every variant. A variant metafield rule passes if any of the product’s variants passes it. Negative relations pass only if none of the variants match, so a product is excluded as soon as one of its variants matches.

Backfilling products that already exist

Both push mechanisms are reactive — they act on products going forward, as they are published or created. If you set up a subscription for a source store that already contains products you want in the subscribing store, add the synkro-publish tag to those existing products (in bulk if needed) to push the qualifying ones into the subscribing store.

If you need help performing a large one-time import of an entire source store’s matching catalog, send an email to support@synkro-app.com and we can assist with a bulk backfill.

Related documentation

• Product Cloning — all of the ways to copy products between your stores, including the automatic cloning options that power subscriptions.
• Dropship supplier store setup — connect with other Shopify stores as dropship suppliers, one of the store types you can subscribe to.