Channels and readiness

A channel is a place your catalog is sold or shown, such as a storefront, a marketplace or an ad feed. Channels do two things in minipim. They hold channel-specific attribute values (a different title for one store), and each channel has a list of required attributes that gives every product a readiness score for that channel.

Readiness is informational. It tells you what’s missing, but it doesn’t stop a product being saved, published or synced. The only check that blocks anything is on product status: setting a product active needs its family’s required attributes.

In the admin

1. Go to System → Channels and click New channel. Enter a Name, a Code and comma-separated Locales (for example en_US, fr_FR), then click Create.
2. On the channel card, click attributes under Not required to move them to Required, or click them again to move them back. Then click Save.
3. Open any product. The Channel readiness card shows a score per channel and what’s missing, such as “Needs GTIN on 2 variants”.

To give an attribute a channel-specific value, mark it Scopable under Catalog → Attributes. Then pick the channel in the product editor’s Channel selector. Default (all channels) edits the shared value.

To delete a channel, click the trash icon on its card and confirm with Delete channel.

With the API

Method	Path	What it does
GET, POST	/v1/channels	List or create channels
PATCH, DELETE	/v1/channels/{id}	Update name, locales, settings, or delete
GET	/v1/products/{id}/completeness	Readiness per channel for one product

curl -X PATCH https://api.minipim.com/v1/channels/CHANNEL_ID \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer pim_…' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{ "settings": { "required_attributes": ["description", "brand", "gtin"] } }'

The completeness response has one entry per channel with channelCode, total, filled, score (0–100) and a missing list of { code, locale, label }. Missing identifiers also report variantsMissing and variantsTotal. Full reference: api.minipim.com/docs.

How the score is worked out

• A channel’s required set is its required_attributes, plus every attribute that’s required in the product’s family.
• A channel requirement only counts if the attribute is in the product’s family. Identifier codes are the exception.
• A localizable attribute counts once per locale on the channel, and each locale needs its own value.
• For a scopable attribute, either a value for this channel or the shared value counts.
• sku, upc, gtin, mpn, ean, asin and isbn are checked against variant identifiers, and every variant needs one. gtin accepts any GTIN length or EAN. Partial coverage earns partial credit.
• brand is satisfied by the product’s brand or by a brand attribute value.
• Empty strings, empty lists and empty objects count as missing. A channel with nothing required scores 100.

Rules and limits

• code is set when the channel is created and can’t be changed. It’s the key used in channel-specific values and ?channel=. Codes are unique within an organization.
• PATCH replaces the whole settings object, so include the keys you want to keep. Send null to clear it.
• The admin card edits required attributes only. Change name or locales through the API.
• Deleting a channel is refused (409) while content pages or categories are bound to it, because deleting would remove them too. Send ?detach=true to make them org-wide first. In the admin, click Make them org-wide and delete.
• Channel-specific attribute values aren’t deleted with the channel. They come back if you recreate a channel with the same code.
• Channels created by a connector carry bc_* or shopify_* keys in settings. Leave those keys alone.
• Changes emit channel.created, channel.updated and channel.deleted for webhooks.