Shopify’s product model is deliberately flat: a title, a description, a vendor, tags, up to three options, and metafields for everything else. That’s fine for a storefront and painful for a catalog. The minipim Shopify connector imports your Shopify products into a typed, schema-backed catalog, and from then on keeps Shopify updated as you edit.
How the connector works
Pull (Shopify → minipim). Click Pull on the connector and minipim imports your Shopify products and variants: titles, descriptions, vendor, product type, tags, SEO title and meta description, prices and compare-at prices, weight, SKUs, variant options and product images. Each Shopify option (Size, Color…) becomes a select attribute on the variant, so your variant axes are real data instead of free text.
Push (minipim → Shopify). Every product that came from Shopify stays linked to its Shopify product. When you change one in minipim, the connector pushes the update to Shopify automatically — and there’s a Push button for a full resync. Push updates title, status, description, vendor, product type, tags, SEO fields, variant prices and SKUs.
The connector is pull-first by design: Shopify products come in, get enriched in minipim, and their updates flow back out. It doesn’t create new products in Shopify.
What syncs
| Data | Pull | Push |
|---|---|---|
| Title, status, handle | ✓ | Title and status |
| Description (HTML ↔ Markdown) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vendor, product type, tags | ✓ | ✓ |
| SEO title and meta description | ✓ | ✓ |
| Variant prices | ✓ | ✓ |
| Compare-at price | ✓ | — |
| Variant SKUs | ✓ | ✓ |
| Options → variant attributes | ✓ | — |
| Weight | ✓ | — |
| Product images | ✓ (kept on Shopify’s CDN) | — |
Not synced today: metafields, collections, variant images, barcodes and inventory. minipim doesn’t manage stock at all — Shopify stays the system of record for inventory.
Setup
- In minipim, open Connectors, find Shopify under Available, and click Install.
- Connect with OAuth (recommended). The first time, minipim walks you through a one-time app setup: paste the callback URL it shows into your Shopify app’s Allowed redirection URLs, then enter the app’s Client ID and Client secret. After that, give the connector a Name and your Store domain and click Connect to Shopify.
- Or use an access token. Choose Use a manual access token instead, then enter a Name, your Store domain and an Admin API access token (
shpat_…). minipim checks the credentials when you click Install. - Click Pull to import your catalog. The connector creates a Shopify channel in minipim, with required attributes you can edit under Channels to drive readiness scoring.
Scopes
The connector needs read_products, write_products and read_product_listings. read_inventory is optional and read-only. It never needs write access to inventory or locations.
Know before you connect
- Pull replaces what it imported. Each pull re-creates the products this connector owns from Shopify’s current data, so values you’ve hand-edited in minipim on those products are overwritten. Make Shopify-side changes in minipim and let push carry them, rather than editing in both places.
- Push is last-write-wins. It overwrites the linked Shopify product without checking whether it changed in Shopify since.
- Readiness doesn’t gate push. Channel readiness tells you what’s missing; it doesn’t hold an update back.
- Large products. The first 100 variants and 50 images per product are imported.
- Prices import as USD.
The connector is in beta while these edges are worked out. If you’re building a custom Shopify storefront, you can also read the catalog directly through the REST API and webhooks.