Creating and Managing Listings

Goflow provides a convenient and user-friendly listing tool for select channels, allowing you to create and update listings seamlessly within a familiar environment. Even if your listings were originally created with a different tool, you can import and manage them directly in Goflow.

Goflow supports listing management for the following channels:

• Target Plus
• Shein
• Macys
• Walmart US

In order to create and manage listings in Goflow, users must have the Listings role assigned to their profile. This ensures that only authorized users can perform listing-related tasks.

Products vs. Listings: Understanding the Difference

Before diving into the details of managing listings, it is important to understand the difference between products and listings in Goflow:

• Products in Goflow serve as your single master catalog. A product contains all the information about your items, and you maintain just one product catalog.
• Listings are store-specific catalogs. Each store you partner with will have its own set of listings derived from the products in your master catalog. Listings include store-specific details such as pricing, shipping information, and additional attributes required by that particular channel.

Products and listings are connected through listing mapping. Each listing is mapped to a corresponding product.

Before manually entering all the details for your listings, it's important to learn about products and how to update product field details. By entering all the details on the central product in your master catalog, the data will cascade down to all its mapped listings. This approach is more efficient, as you can reuse the same details across listings for multiple stores. Review Listing Attribute Mapping to understand how to link product fields to listing attributes.

Creating and Managing Standalone Listings

A standalone listing is a simple listing that is not part of a variation family. The information provided in this article serves as general guidelines applicable to all channels. Different channels may have slightly varying instructions. Some channels, such as Shein, do not support standalone listings; instead, all listings are variations, even if they have only one variation.

Creating a Single Listing

To create a new listing, follow these steps:

1. From the sidebar navigation, go to Listings › Products, and select a product.
2. In the upper-right corner, click on New Listing.
3. Select the store, then click Next.
4. On the listing page, fill in the listing attributes, then click Publish.

Editing a Single Listing

To edit an existing listing, follow these steps:

1. From the sidebar navigation, go to Listings › Listings, and select a listing.
2. In the upper-right corner, click on Manage Listing.
3. Update the listing attributes, then click Publish.

Filling In Listing Attributes

If you have set up listing attribute mapping, you don't need to fill in the attributes manually on the listing page. Goflow will prefill all attributes with data from the mapped product fields, helping you create new listings using the information you already entered for the product.

Click the tip (?) icon next to each field to see a short explanation for that attribute.

Listing attributes are organized into tabs. Go through each tab and fill in all applicable fields:

• The SKU attribute is located at the top of the page. This is the SKU for the store listing and may be different from the Goflow product item number. The SKU must be unique within your store catalog. Two listings cannot share the same SKU.

• Product - General information about the listing, such a title, description and bullet features.

• Category - All required and optional attributes available for the selected category.

• Price - Various prices for the listing, such as List Price, Sale Price and MAP Price. The List Price is the regular retail price. Sale Price is the promotional, discounted price. When sale price is empty or 0, the listing will sell for the regular list price.

• Images - A list of product images. The first image is the main image, and the rest are additional images.

  Click Upload Image to browse your local files, or drag-and-drop files onto the Upload Image button. You can do this with multiple images at once, to easily upload them all. If your image is already hosted elsewhere, use the Upload From URL option to have Goflow copy the image from that URL.

  You may rearrange existing images by dragging them around on top of each other.

• Shipping - Various shipping-related attributes, such as shipping speed, shipping locations and return policies.

After filling in all your listing attributes, click Publish to send the listing to the store.

When publishing a listing with images, Goflow creates temporary publicly-accessible URLs for those images. This allows the channel to download them without needing authentication. If the listing remains under review with the channel for more than 60 days, you may need to publish the listing again from Goflow.

Listing Approval Process

When publishing a listing, it undergoes validation for data accuracy and channel compliance. This process involves two approval stages:

1. Goflow Validation - Goflow checks the listing for missing required attributes or invalid data. This validation is automatic, and happens immediately. If there are any issues, the listing is not submitted to the channel. Instead, it is placed in Review with the required corrections clearly displayed. You can then review the errors, correct them, and republish.

   To facilitate making corrections, create a custom listings export that includes the Review Reasons field.

   When making updates to an existing listing, the same validation process occurs. If there are any issues, the update is withheld from the channel to prevent small data errors from causing the listing to go offline and lose sales.

   Once the listing passes Goflow's validation, it is submitted to the channel. New listings are marked as Pending, awaiting the channel's approval. For listing updates, the page shows the Update Pending substatus, indicating that an update is awaiting the channel's approval.

2. Channel Validation - After Goflow submits the listing to the channel, the channel reviews it for compliance. If the channel finds any issues, Goflow places the listing in Review, with the required corrections clearly displayed.

   Listings may remain in Pending for some time. If a listing seems stuck in this status longer than usual, contact the channel to determine the cause of the delay.

   When the channel approves the listing, it is automatically marked as Active in Goflow. Congratulations, your listing has been successfully published!

Creating Listings in Bulk

To create multiple new listings at once, follow these steps:

1. From the sidebar navigation, go to Listings › Products.
2. Select multiple products.
3. Click on Actions › Create Listings.
4. Select the store.
5. Choose either Manual or Synced.
6. Finally, click to Create the new listings.

At a minimum, a listing must have at least a SKU in order to get created. The listing SKU will be either the product's item number or another product field set up in listing attribute mapping. For all other required attributes, if they are missing or invalid, the listing will still be created but will move to Review by the Goflow validation process.

Goflow provides a detailed error log that informs you of the state of the listings created in bulk:

• Success - If all required listing attributes are mapped correctly and the product fields are filled, the listings will be published.
• Created with Errors: If some required attributes are not mapped, the listings will be created but placed in Review. The missing attributes must be filled in before the listings can be published.
• Failure: If the SKU attribute is not mapped, or if a listing with this SKU already exists, the listing cannot be created. Download the feedback file for a list of SKUs that were not created.

Deactivating and Reactivating Listings

When you no longer want to sell a product on one of your stores, you can deactivate the listing by changing its status to Inactive. Goflow will notify the channel, which will then deactivate the listing on their end.

By default, the main listings page in Goflow hides inactive listings. To view inactive listings, open the Filters menu and uncheck Hide Inactive.

Published listings cannot be deleted. The SKU remains with the channel even if the listing is inactive, and you cannot create a new listing using the same SKU. If you want to sell that product again, activate the listing by changing its status back to Active. Goflow will notify the channel, which will then reactivate the listing on their end.

Working with Draft Listings

If you are not yet ready to publish a listing because you are still missing some required attributes, you can save it as a draft. Drafts are generally useful for saving your progress in case the page is accidentally closed. To save a listing as a draft, follow these steps:

1. From the sidebar navigation, go to Listings › Products, and select a product.
2. In the upper-right corner, click on New Listing.
3. Select the store, then click Next.
4. On the listing page, click on the split arrow next to Publish, and select Save as Draft.

You can save a listing as a draft even if you have entered nothing but the SKU. However, the SKU is required and cannot be changed later, even in a draft. Choose the SKU carefully, ensuring it is unique, meaningful, and systematic.

Continue updating the listing attributes as needed. At any time, you can save your changes by clicking Save as Draft again. When you're ready to publish the listing, click on the split arrow, and select Publish.

If you wish to discard your draft, click Delete.

You can create draft listings in bulk by clicking on the split arrow next to Create, and selecting Create as Draft.

Creating and Managing Variation Listings

Variations are a family of related listings that feature the same product with different variants in either size or color. They are usually displayed together as a single listing on the channel, with options to choose between the different variations.

In Goflow, the term Family Type is used to differentiate between standalone listings, which are not related to any other listings, and variation listings, which are related as part of a variation family.

The main listings page provides a Family Type filter, allowing you to filter for either standalone or variation listings.

While all variations within a single family are managed together on the same listing page, it's important to note that each variant is considered a distinct listing in Goflow. This means that each variant has its own unique SKU and is mapped to a specific product.

Creating a New Variation Listing Family

To create a new family of variation listings, start with any product in that family:

1. From the sidebar navigation, go to Listings › Products, and select a product.
2. In the upper-right corner, click on New Listing.
3. Select the store.
4. If prompted, select the listing category.
5. For Family Type, select Variation Listing.
6. For Varies By, select either Size, Color, or both, and click Next.
7. On the listing page, add the other variants to the list of Variation Products.
8. Fill in the variation listing attributes.
9. Finally, click Publish to complete your listing.

You can also start a new variation family using an existing standalone listing. To do so, follow these steps:

1. From the sidebar navigation, go to Listings › Listings, and select a standalone listing.
2. On the Status card, click the pencil icon next to Family Type and select Variation.
3. Check Create New Variation Family.
4. For Varies By, select either Size, Color, or both, and click Continue.
5. On the listing page, add the other variants to the list of Variation Products.
6. Finally, click Publish to complete your variation listing.

Editing an Existing Variation Listing Family

To edit an existing family of variation listings, start with any listing in that family:

1. From the sidebar navigation, go to Listings › Listings, and select a listing.
2. In the upper-right corner, click on Manage Listing..
3. Make your desired changes, then click Publish.

You can make the following updates to a variation family:

• Update listing attributes
• Add variation SKUs
• Deactivate or delete variation SKUs
• Change the variation type

Filling In Variation Listing Attributes

To understand the discussion on variation listing attributes, start by reading the section on standalone listing attributes.

Variation attributes are divided into four sections:

• Parent SKU - This SKU identifies the entire variation family and must be unique. It cannot be the same as any of the individual variation SKUs. While the parent SKU doesn't represent a specific listing, you can locate all variants by searching the Goflow listings page using the parent SKU.

• Variation Products - A summary of all variation listings in the family, including their mapped products, size, color, and activation status. The Variation SKU is the unique SKU for each individual listing.

• Parent Attributes - These details describe the product as a whole, not specific to any variant. Parent attributes are prefilled with data from the first variant. It is expected however that all relevant parent attributes be shared among all variants. Product UPC and images are specific to each variant and are not prefilled for the parent.

  As you manually enter or update parent attributes, Goflow automatically copies the information to all variants. You can later change the details for each variant separately as needed. However, parent images are not automatically copied to the variants. If you upload a general image, click on Copy to Variations to copy the parent image to all variants.

• Variations Details - These details describe each individual variant. This section features a sidebar listing the variation SKUs and a details pane displaying the attributes for each variant.

  Goflow automatically copies attribute information from the parent to all variants. To customize an attribute for a specific variant, simply change it here. When you modify a detail on a variant, the field will turn purple to indicate that this attribute is no longer linked to the parent. Future updates to the parent attribute will not affect this variant.

  The category cannot be changed for individual variants; the entire family always belongs to the same category.

Adding Additional Variants to a Family

Whether creating a new variation family or editing an existing one, you can easily add additional variants at any time. To add more variants, follow these steps:

1. In the Variation Products section, click the Plus sign next to any product to insert a new line.
2. Select a product under Item Number, and enter a new Variation SKU.
3. Enter the Size and Color.

You can rearrange the order of variants. Use the drag handle located to the right of each variant to move it up or down in the list.

You can add existing standalone listings to a variation family. However, to move variants from one family to another, you must first convert those variation listings to standalone listings before adding them to a different variation family.

To add an existing standalone listing to a variation family, follow these steps:

1. In the Variation Products section, open the three-dot menu in the upper right.
2. Select Add Existing Listing.
3. Find the standalone listing, and click Add Listing as Variation.

All variants in a family share the same category. When adding an existing standalone listing to a variation family, its category will be updated to match the family's category if necessary.

Deactivating and Reactivating Variants

You can activate, deactivate, or delete variation listings just like standalone listings. However, it might be easier to change the status of variations when viewing the entire family. You can toggle the status of variation listings in the Variation Products section.

• To activate an inactive listing, click Activate ✓.
• To deactivate an active listing, click Deactivate x.
• To delete a draft listing, click Delete bin.
• To deactivate the whole family, simply deactivate all variants in the family.

After making your changes, click Publish.

Changing the Variation Type

The Variation Type defines how variations differ from one another. A variation family can vary by size, color, or both. To change the variation type, follow these steps:

1. In the Variation Products section, open the three-dot menu in the upper right.
2. Select Varies By....
3. Select either Size, Color, or both.
4. Click Update Variation Types.

After making your changes, click Publish.

Converting a Variation to a Standalone Listing

To remove a variation listing from its family and make it a standalone listing, follow these steps:

1. From the sidebar navigation, go to Listings › Listings, and select the variation listing.
2. On the Status card, click the pencil icon next to Family Type and select Standalone.
3. Click on Save & Republish.

Working with Draft Variations

Create a new variation listing, and save the entire variation family as a draft. Draft variations require at least a parent SKU and a SKU for each variant.

You can add a standalone to a variation, as long as both the variation and the standalone are drafts.

To add a draft standalone to a published variation, or vice versa, a published standalone to a draft variation, you'll need to publish the listing updates. You cannot save the variation as a draft if some of its variants are already published.