“Complete” means different things in different places. Your web store needs a description and images; a marketplace feed needs a barcode on every variant; a wholesale catalogue needs case dimensions. In minipim, each of those is a channel with its own list of required attributes, and every product is scored against each one.

1. Create the channel

Go to Channels and click New channel. Give it a Name, a Code and the Locales it sells in (comma-separated, like en_US, fr_CA). If you connected BigCommerce or Shopify, the first pull already created a channel for that store with a sensible starting list — you can edit it like any other.

2. Decide what it requires

On the channel’s card, attributes are shown in two groups, Required and Not required. Click an attribute to move it between them, then Save.

Some things to know as you choose:

  • Localizable attributes are required in every locale the channel sells in. A French-Canadian channel requiring description needs a French description.
  • Barcodes are required per variant. Require gtin, upc or mpn and every variant needs one.
  • Only require what the channel genuinely needs. Every extra requirement lowers every score.

3. Read the scores

Open any product. The Channel readiness card shows an overall score and a row per channel with its percentage and the most important gap — “Needs GTIN on 2 variants”, “Needs description (fr_CA)”. Expand a row to see everything missing. A channel with nothing missing reads Ready to publish.

4. Work through gaps across the catalog

Fixing products one at a time is slow. Two faster routes:

  • By attribute, with bulk edit. If a whole range is missing the same value, select those products on the product list and use Set attribute to fill it in once. See cleaning up your catalog in bulk.
  • With an AI agent. Connect Claude through the MCP server and ask it to run the prep-for-channel workflow. Its find_incomplete_products tool ranks your whole catalog by readiness, worst first, with a breakdown of which attribute is missing most often — then works through them one attribute at a time, and reports anything it can’t fill rather than inventing it.

What readiness does — and doesn’t — do

Readiness tells you what’s missing; it doesn’t block anything. Connectors sync products whatever their score. The one hard rule is the family’s own required attributes, which must be filled before a product can be set to active. Use the family for what every product must have and channels for what each destination needs.