As a merchant, your catalog is constantly changing and there are a variety of ways Stay AI works to support you and your customers. Below we’ve outlined a few steps to take when updating certain product attributes for on your store.
Small Updates
Small updates are updates to a product that don’t affect revenue or fulfillment. These include, but are not limited to:
Adding new products
Updating product images
Updating product descriptions
Updating product titles (this could affect fulfillment depending on your store)
Updating variant titles (this could affect fulfillment depending on your store)
Enabling or disabling the charging of tax
etc.
For small updates and when adding new products, it’s important to sync your catalog with Stay AI by logging into the Stay AI app, clicking Settings, clicking General, and clicking the Refresh Products button (shown below).
Large Updates (Please reach out in advance)
Some updates will require you to reach out to the Stay team to update existing subscriptions in addition to syncing your catalog with the Refresh Products button. When a customer checks out with a subscription, product values are set permanently on the subscription until they are updated by you or the customer. Meaning if you update the following values, we’ll need to update them for existing subscriptions.
Price
If you don’t update price for existing subscriptions, they’ll be charged the old price until they swap that product.
SKU
Old SKU values will continue to be sent for new orders
Variant ID - This is a unique value for every product in your Shopify store. It is a product’s most important value.
You may need to create a new product in Shopify and swap all customers from the old product to the new product. This swill not occur automatically.
A variant ID for a product can also change if you add variant options to a product that previously had none. This will prevent any subscriptions on the old variant ID from being charged and creating new orders.
You’ll also need to update this value if you delete a product in Shopify customers are subscribed to.
How can I find a Variant ID?
The video below explains how to find a Variant ID.
If a product has variants, you can click into the variant page in your Shopify catalog and find it using the URL for that page
https://admin.shopify.com/store/your-store/products/PRODUCT ID/variants/VARIANT ID
If a product doesn’t have variants, you’ll need to add .json to the end of the product page URL in Shopify and look for the value after id:
The Chrome Extension JSONVue comes in very handy when looking for these values. Otherwise, the data is more difficult to read.
With JSONVue :
Without JSONVue:
Please note that if you add a variant or variants to a product that previously did not, the Variant ID of that product will be deleted and replaced with the Variant IDs of the newly added variants. In this case, you will likely need our assistance with a bulk swap. If you are planning to do this, please reach out to the Stay AI team using the chat icon in the bottom right corner or email your customer success manager.
Setting a Product to Draft
This will have no affect for existing subscriptions ability to create orders and whether or not the product shows up in the customer portal.
Archiving a Product
This will have no affect for existing subscriptions ability to create orders and whether or not the product shows up in the customer portal.
Deleting a Product
You will need to pull an export of subscriptions assigned to the old variant ID and reach out the Stay AI team for assistance on swapping variant IDs to a new product.
Discontinuing a Product
There are two paths when discontinuing a product:
Swapping existing subscribers to a new product in Shopify
Canceling and deleting any subscriptions assigned to that product
In either case, it’s best to reach out to subscribers with an email campaign and by putting an informational banner on your website.
Please let our team know in advance of making large changes to your product catalog so that we can help make these processes as smooth as possible.