How channel onboarding works
Connecting a Shopify store is the one time Yessort trusts a store's data. It has nothing of its own yet, so the store's products and stock are the only sensible starting point. Because that trust is temporary and consequential, it happens inside a guided wizard rather than in one step.
Nothing is kept until you say so
The wizard pulls the store's catalogue into a staging area first. Staged rows are not products, not variants and not stock — they are a proposal you work through. Nothing reaches your real catalogue until you commit.
That separation is what makes the awkward cases safe. A store with duplicate SKUs, variants with no SKU at all, or products that match something you already sell can all be sorted out while they are still proposals.
Staged rows are kept for 30 days. If you stop partway you can pick up where you left off inside that window; after it, the staged data is treated as stale and the wizard pulls the store again.
The stages
Connect. You supply the store's domain and an access token, or install through Shopify. Either route ends with the same stored connection.
Map locations. Yessort reads the store's locations and asks which Yessort site each one means. A Shopify "Location" is a building, so it always maps to a Yessort site, never to a Yessort location. You can mark a location as ignored, and you pick one mapping as the default for orders that do not say where they came from. The wizard only blocks here if the store has no locations at all — in which case add one in Shopify and come back.
Pull. A background job copies the store's products, variants and per-location stock into staging. You can watch it run. Nothing has entered your catalogue at this point.
Checks. Yessort inspects what it pulled and flags what needs a decision: SKUs duplicated within the store, SKUs that match a variant you already have, variants with no SKU, and barcodes matching a physical product already registered as an anchor.
Review. You work through the staged variants, deciding on each: create it as a new variant, link it to one you already have, or skip it. Yessort proposes a decision for each row where it can; yours replaces its guess and is never overwritten afterwards. See how the review queue works.
Commit. Your decisions are applied. Variants marked create become real products and variants and are given their starting stock from what was staged. Variants marked link are attached to the existing variant you chose, and their stock is left alone — you already knew what you were holding.
Activate. Yessort subscribes to the store's events and the channel goes live. Orders begin arriving straight away. See activate a channel.
What changes at activation
Before activation, the store is the source and Yessort is filling itself in. After it, that reverses for good: Yessort holds the stock figures and tells the store what to display. Everything in who owns your product data applies from this moment.
If your channel already had listings linked before it was activated, the reconcile that runs at activation books no stock differences automatically — every one is held for a person. See keeping stock in step.
If it goes wrong partway
The connection dropping during the pull is not damaging: staged rows persist and you resume. Abandoning the review leaves the channel un-activated and the staged rows waiting out their 30 days. Re-running the wizard re-pulls and asks again.