How products get into ASM

ASM keeps its own copy of your store's products. At checkout, it reads that copy to know what each item weighs and how it should ship. This article explains where that copy comes from and what keeps it up to date.

Beginner · How it works

Before you begin

Two kinds of product information

Your store owns: the product's weight, name, price and whether it's taxable. ASM copies these from your store and you can't change them in ASM. To change one, edit the product in your store.

ASM owns: the shipping settings, such as dimensions, ship alone, boxes, origin, free or flat shipping, markup and restrictions. You set these on the Products page or with a CSV file. On Turbify, they come from your store too (see below).

A product sync refreshes what your store owns. On Shopify and BigCommerce it normally leaves your ASM shipping settings alone.

One product per SKU

ASM tracks products by SKU:

  • On Shopify, every variant is its own product in ASM, named "Product title - Variant title". A variant without a SKU uses its numeric variant ID as its SKU.
  • On BigCommerce, every product or variant with a SKU is a product in ASM. Products and variants without a SKU are skipped.
  • If two variants share a SKU, they share one product in ASM.

Because the SKU is the link, changing a SKU in your store creates a new product in ASM with empty shipping settings. Re-apply your settings to the new SKU.

How each platform syncs

Shopify

  • When you install ASM, it imports your whole catalog. A large catalog can take a few hours.
  • After that, when you create or edit a product in Shopify, ASM updates it within moments.
  • Archived products aren't imported. Draft products are.
  • A product deleted in Shopify can stay on the Products page until the next full sync.

BigCommerce

  • When you install ASM, it imports your whole catalog in the background, page by page.
  • After that, products you create, edit or delete in BigCommerce are updated in ASM automatically.
  • A full import also runs when you add a storefront or channel, and when you change your store's weight unit in BigCommerce.

Turbify (Yahoo)

  • ASM re-imports your products every time you publish your store.
  • On Turbify, every product setting comes from your store, including the ASM shipping fields. Each publish replaces what ASM had. There's no Products page or CSV upload by default.
  • To update ASM after you change a product, publish your store.

See Get started with ASM on Turbify (Yahoo).

Weight: where the default comes in

If a product's weight is empty or 0 when it syncs, ASM uses the Default product weight value from Settings → General. Changing that default later doesn't change products that already synced. They pick up the new default the next time they sync (on Shopify and BigCommerce, when you next edit the product in your store). See Set your origin address and default product weight.

What if a product isn't in ASM yet?

Checkout still works. ASM rates the item with the Default product weight value, no dimensions and none of your product settings. Rates can be off until the product syncs. See A product is missing in ASM.

How to tell your products synced

  • On your Dashboard, the setup step Your products are in ASM says how many products synced from your store.
  • A full sync is recorded in the Activity Log as "Full product sync finished" (or "failed").
  • Search for a product on the Products page.

Starting a full sync

There's no resync button. On Shopify and BigCommerce, products update on their own when you edit them in your store. If you need everything re-imported, contact support at support@advancedshippingmanager.com or 1-888-546-4932 (Mon–Fri, 9AM–5PM EST) and ask for a full product sync. On Turbify, publish your store.

Settings that come from your store instead

Some stores choose to manage shipping settings in their platform instead of in ASM. Then each sync overwrites the matching ASM settings:

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