Channels
A channel is a place your organisation sells. Every order in Yessort belongs to one, which is why each new organisation is given a channel called Manual the moment it is created — without it, there would be nothing to record a phone order or a trade order against.
There are two kinds you can actually have.
A manual channel has no store behind it. Nothing is synchronised, because there is nothing to synchronise with: you type orders in and Yessort records them. The seeded Manual channel is one of these.
A Shopify channel is created when you connect a Shopify store. From then on Yessort lists products on that store, tells it how much stock to show, and takes in the orders it sends back. One organisation can have several, because a channel carries its own currency, price list and settings — two Shopify stores are two channels, even when the products are identical.
Yessort owns the data
One rule runs through everything on these pages, and almost every behaviour below follows from it:
Yessort owns the data. The channel is told, not asked.
Stock figures travel outwards. When your stock and the store's disagree in normal running, Yessort pushes the correct figure rather than accepting the store's. Products are the same: the store may propose a product it knows about, but it lands in a review queue for a person to decide on, rather than creating anything on its own.
There are two deliberate exceptions, both narrow, and both explained in full on who owns your product data: the onboarding window when a store is first connected, and a small stock difference found when a brand-new listing is linked.
Where the screens live
Setting a channel up is organisation administration — connecting a store and editing its settings both live under your organisation's Integrations settings, and need organisation-admin access.
The day-to-day work does not. The channel review queue and the coverage matrix sit in the main workspace under Catalogue, because they are queues an operator clears, not things you configure once.
Concepts
- How channels work — the channel, the connection behind it, and what each one decides.
- Who owns your product data — the rule above, its two exceptions, and what the store is allowed to change.
- How channel onboarding works — why a new store's catalogue is staged before any of it is kept.
- How catalogue linking works — what links a Yessort variant to a listing, and which variants get published.
- How the review queue works — products the store proposes, and the decisions you make about them.
- How stock reaches a channel — which figure is sent, and to which of the store's locations.
- Keeping stock in step — the checks that find differences, and which ones are put right automatically.
- How negative stock happens — why a channel can sell units you do not have.
- How channel orders arrive — orders coming in, and dispatches going back.
- Unlisting and relisting — taking something off sale, and what happens if it comes back.
- Safety nets — why Yessort re-checks its own work rather than trusting every event arrived.
- When an order arrives late — the hour between a missed event and the order appearing anyway.
How to
Start with connect a Shopify store, then map Shopify locations to sites, review and commit your catalogue and activate the channel.
Once it is running, the recurring jobs are clearing the review queue, resolving a stock reconcile review and recovering negative stock.