Shopify Advanced Settings

The Advanced Settings page controls how products are imported into Google Cloud after merchants have mapped the main attributes and filters.

Exclude Products

Exclude Products by Tag

Use Shopify tags when a merchant needs to hide a primary product and all of its variants from:

• Search results
• Collection pages
• Recommendations

This is useful for items such as warranties, service plans, gift wrap, shipping-only products, or other non-merchandise catalog entries.

Exclude Products by Metafield

Use metafield exclusions when the rule needs to apply at the variant level instead of the primary product level.

The current Retail Cloud Connect Shopify App supports:

• Product Variant metafields only
• Boolean metafields only
• True or False values selected per metafield

Expand Products by Product Option

Enable Expand Product Variants when variants such as different colors or sizes should appear as separate products in Google Cloud and on storefront results.

Common use cases include:

• Showing each colorway as its own product card
• Giving size or width variants their own search result
• Improving visibility for high-value variants that should not be hidden inside a parent product

After enabling the setting, choose the Shopify product option that should be used to split variants, such as Color or Size.

The import creates one primary record per distinct sanitized option value and appends it to the product ID.

Product Description Data Source

Set Product Description Data Source to a product metafield if that metafield holds more complete descriptive copy than the default product description field.

This setting is helpful when:

• Merchandising teams maintain curated or SEO-tuned copy in a metafield
• Product descriptions are short or inconsistent
• Merchants want AI Commerce Search to rank and understand products using curated text

If the selected metafield yields text, Retail Cloud Connect uses it as the imported description; otherwise it uses the standard Shopify description. This setting replaces Use SEO Descriptions, and existing choices are not migrated. To keep using Shopify SEO descriptions, copy them into a product metafield and select it. See Product Description Source for details.

Local Inventory

Use Local Inventory to sync available quantities from selected Shopify locations into Google Cloud and let shoppers filter search and collection results by what is available at their local store.

Category Enrichment

Use Category Enrichment when eligible stores need AI assistance assigning product categories before import.

Manual Collection Ordering

Enable Manual Collection Ordering to use Shopify's curated product order on collection pages. Select between one and five collections from the exhaustive list of Shopify collections whose sort order is Manual. Retail Cloud Connect stores their canonical legacy numeric IDs (1–20 digits, no leading zero), removing duplicates and sorting them consistently. The same enabled state, IDs, and revision apply to every sibling market/shop row for the Shopify store.

If Shopify has no manually sorted collections, the setting remains unavailable and explains that a collection's product sorting must first be changed to Manually in Shopify.

The next clean full import records each eligible selected collection's order using sparse numeric ranks (1000, 2000, 3000, and so on). Internally, collection 123 is stored on applicable primary products as rcc_collection_rank_123. These rank attributes are ordering metadata only and are never available as storefront filters or facets. A selected collection that is deleted, no longer manual, incomplete, or skipped because of Google limits stays configured but does not become ranked or ready.

When an eligible collection is ranked successfully, its sort dropdown includes the translatable Featured option and uses it by default. Featured is collection-only: it is not available in search, on collections that are no longer manually sorted, or before the selected collection has ready imported rank data. A shopper's explicit sort selection still takes precedence, and manual collection ordering overrides Prioritize AI Sort Order for a ready selected collection.

Disabling retains the saved picker choices for re-enabling, but clears published selection and readiness. Any effective enabled-state or ID change advances the shared configuration revision and immediately clears ranked IDs and the imported revision. The store-wide save is committed only after this clear succeeds, so a failed save leaves Featured unavailable rather than exposing stale readiness. Saving the same effective configuration is a no-op: it preserves the revision and readiness. Adding a sibling market also advances the shared revision and clears readiness until every sibling catalog has imported it.

Readiness is published only after every sibling market catalog completes the same clean full-import snapshot without product row errors and obsolete rank data has been removed. The platform rechecks every sibling setting before cleanup and again before publishing, requiring the enabled state, canonical IDs, and captured revision to match. A mid-import settings change therefore cancels finalization and leaves Featured unavailable rather than publishing stale readiness. Partial imports, dry runs, failed imports, row-error imports, and the zero-product shortcut never publish readiness; a settings-race cancellation does not publish it either.

Shopify reorder events are not imported by the sync service in this version, so merchandising changes become visible after the next clean full import rather than in real time. Routine sync product writes can also remove a rank from an individual product; that product's Featured position is restored by the next clean full import.

When Changes Take Effect

Changes to variant grouping, product description source, product exclusions, category enrichment, or manual collection ordering mark the catalog as requiring a full import. The Data Settings status and automatic schema-sync task use the same classification, so the pending indicator remains visible until a full import starts. Manual ordering is not published as ready until that full import completes cleanly across all sibling market catalogs.

Local inventory removals use their dedicated partial schema-import flow instead of this full-import status. Other Advanced Settings that only affect storefront behavior do not mark catalog data as stale.

For the main import and attribute mapping workflow, see Catalog Import. Advanced and enterprise merchants can also use Google Cloud for project details, service account access, and document search settings.