What is Bulk Listing Connect?
Onboarding a full catalog to a print-on-demand service can be tedious, but with Artelo’s Bulk Listing Connect, it's fast and easy. This tool is designed to help you connect your listings at scale and save you time. In this article, we’ll walk through how the bulk connection flow works, key terms to understand before you start, and the preliminary steps you'll need to follow.
Key Terms
Before we dive in, here’s a quick guide to some important terms you’ll see throughout the process:
Product Sets: Groups of related products that represent a single design. For example, all the size and frame variations of a particular art print would be grouped into one product set. Typically, a product set corresponds to a listing you sell in your store.
Products: The physical items you’re selling, such as a 12x16 framed print or an 8x10 unframed poster. Each variant in a listing corresponds to a product in a product set.
Listings: The customer-facing pages on your Shopify or Etsy store. A listing might have one or more variants (like size or frame color).
Listing Variants: The individual options within a listing, such as "8x10 Unframed" or "12x16 Framed in Black." Each of these is tied to a product in Artelo.
Templates: Pre-configured settings that define options like size, paper type, and framing for a product set and a listing's variation structure, pricing, option names, and more. Templates are used to rapidly create new listings and product sets with the same structure. When onboarding to Artelo, templates help ensure consistency by applying the same setup across groups of similar listings.
How the Bulk Connect Flow Works
The bulk connect listing flow is designed to help you onboard larger catalogs to Artelo quickly and consistently. Before getting started, you'll create Templates that define both the Product Set settings (like sizes and frame options) and Listing settings (like variation structure, pricing, and shipping profiles).
Then, you’ll complete two Excel files: the first is used to assign a Template and Product Set Name to each listing you want to connect, and the second lets you review and customize listing details like titles, descriptions, and tags to verify that any changes we make to your listings are consistent with your expectations. Once both files are uploaded, Artelo will automatically create all your product sets and apply changes to your listings in bulk. After the setup, your product sets will still be missing the final design files, but once the first order for each product comes in, you’ll upload the artwork just once, and any future orders will be automatically fulfilled by Artelo.
The bulk listing connect flow was designed to handle many different types of listing setups and during this tutorial series we will walk through a full onboarding example with lots of use cases. But essentially, the entire process boils down to three steps:
Preliminary Setup
First, make sure your stores are connected in Artelo and that your listings are synced. Then, create your templates, which are the foundation for your bulk connection process. Each template should reflect your product set choices, listing structures, and pricing you want to apply across a group of listings. Once your templates are ready, you can begin the two-step Excel process to map your listings and finalize the details.
Assign Templates and Create Product Sets
First, you’ll export an Excel file of your existing listings. In this file, you’ll assign a Template and Product Set Name to each of your listings that you want to bulk connect on Artelo. When this file is uploaded, Artelo will know exactly how to create your new product sets for your listing.Update Listing Details
Next, you’ll review and customize your listing content. You can update titles, descriptions, tags, and shipping profiles, or set SKU prefixes. Templates will automatically apply standard settings like shipping and option names, but you can make other adjustments before finalizing.
Follow along with our tutorial series
In this series, we’ll walk through the full process of bulk onboarding listings to Artelo, starting with an Etsy store. We’ll begin by connecting the store, syncing the listings, and setting up the necessary templates. Then we’ll create product sets and assign them to each listing using an Excel file. After that, we’ll review and update the listing details to ensure everything is correct before completing the connection.
Once the Etsy listings are fully set up, we’ll move on to Shopify. In that step, we’ll reuse the same product sets created during the Etsy setup to streamline the process for the Shopify store.
Each part of the process will be covered in its own article and video guide. Follow along using the links below: