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Sync your catalog

Plans: Starter ✓ · Growth ✓ · Pro ✓ · Agency ✓ (catalog size varies by plan — see Plans)

Sync pulls your products, categories (collections, on Shopify) and content pages from your store into Clione. Nothing is enriched — sync builds Clione's working copy so the rest of the platform has something to work on.

Sync never spends a credit. It imports and refreshes your catalog and stops there — the AI model is never called, so you can sync as often as you like at no cost. Enrichment is always a separate action you confirm.

You sync per store. Open the store and click Sync in the store sidebar.

The Sync page​

The page has three cards.

Catalog sync​

⟳ Sync all runs everything in order: products → categories or collections → pages. Clione asks you to confirm first (Sync the whole catalog? → Start sync).

  • Products import as a background job — minutes for large catalogs. The rest takes seconds.
  • Each row shows its state (queued, running, done, stopped, error) and, when it ends, how many items synced and how many failed.
  • ■ Stop sync stops where it is. Whatever was already imported stays in Clione and the remaining steps don't run. Run it again to finish.

Daily sync​

Clione imports the store's catalog once a day on its own. Sync this store every day is on by default, at 00:00. Change the hour under Run at, or switch Sync this store every day off. The hour is in UTC: stores don't have their own time zone yet, and the card says which time zone applies. A daily sync imports and refreshes only — it never enriches, so it can't cost you credits.

The card also shows the last sync: when it ran, whether it was scheduled or manual, and how many items were processed or failed.

Advanced controls​

Visible to owners and admins. It has one tab per entity type, so you can sync just one of them and see its detail:

  • Products — Sync Products, with a Batch Size option, live progress, imported and failed counts, duration, the last error and a timeline.
  • Categories (BigCommerce) / Collections (Shopify) — Sync Categories / Sync Collections.
  • Content — Sync content imports pages and blog entries.
  • FAQ — how many FAQ entries the store has. FAQs aren't imported from your platform; you create and manage them under FAQs in the store sidebar. See the FAQ editor.

Only owners and admins can stop a sync.

Catalog limits by plan​

PlanStoresProducts (per organization)
Starter1100
Growth12,000
Pro55,000
Agency1010,000

If your organization already holds more products than your plan allows, a new sync is refused with a message that names your plan's limit. Products deleted from your store stop counting against the limit.

Expand credits (Billing & Plan → Add-ons) top up your monthly enrichment quota only — they don't raise the product limit. Upgrading the plan raises the product limit, and the enrichment quota on every step except Pro → Agency.

The store limit applies when you add a store. If you're at the limit, the Add Store wizard offers Upgrade plan or the Extra store add-on, which connects one more store without changing plan (also available on the top plan). See Billing.

When to run a sync​

  • When you first connect a store. Run ⟳ Sync all so Clione has the full picture.
  • After bulk changes in your store admin. A new product line, a category reorganization, rewritten pages.
  • Before bulk-enriching. If you just imported 200 SKUs, sync them in first — Clione only enriches what it already knows about.
  • When the dashboard shows an out-of-date title or description for something you changed in your store admin.

With Daily sync on, most of this happens without you.

You don't need to sync to use the FAQ editor, Reports or the other organization-wide tools. Sync only touches the catalog copy.

Changes made in your store after enrichment​

Every sync compares what your store sends with what Clione enriched. When the title, description, meta title, meta description or keywords of an entity changed in your store admin — or were overwritten by a PIM — after Clione enriched it, the entity appears in the Changed in your store card on the store overview, with the old and the new value of each changed field.

For each one, decide whether to keep your store's version or re-enrich and publish again, then mark the change as reviewed so it stops being flagged. Show reviewed too brings back the ones you've already reviewed.

What gets imported​

BigCommerce​

  • Products — ID, name, SKU, brand, price and currency, description, the categories it belongs to, images, variants, and its SEO fields (page title, meta description, meta keywords, search keywords, custom URL).
  • Categories — the full category tree, with parent links preserved. Sync doesn't change category URLs. Publishing the canonical signal can set a category's custom URL.
  • Content — your content pages (About, Contact, custom pages) and blog posts.

Shopify​

  • Products — ID, title, handle, vendor, product type, tags, price and currency, description, images, variants, and the SEO title and description. On stores that sell in several currencies, the per-currency prices are read too.
  • Collections — both manual and smart (automated) collections.
  • Content — your content pages and blog posts.

Watching progress​

While a sync runs, the Catalog sync card updates each row, and a progress bar at the bottom of the dashboard shows the running operation. Both survive navigation — you can leave the page and come back. When it ends, the bar shows the result until you move on or dismiss it; an error stays until you dismiss it. The listings refresh automatically.

If a sync fails partway (for example, a temporary rate limit from your store's API), what was already synced is kept. Run it again — re-running is safe and updates the same records rather than duplicating them.

Only one product sync runs per store at a time. If one is already running (started from another tab, or the daily run), ⟳ Sync all tells you to wait for it to finish. Several stores can sync in parallel.

How long does it take?​

Rough estimates per 1,000 entities (network and platform-dependent):

EntityBigCommerceShopify
Products30–60s60–120s
Categories / Collections< 5s< 10s
Pages< 5s< 5s

Shopify's API limits by query cost rather than requests per second. Clione waits and retries automatically, so a large Shopify catalog can take several minutes.

Access Clione needs​

Sync only reads. The access each platform needs is set when you connect the store:

Troubleshooting​

Sync fails with "no credentials" or 401 — The access token was revoked or has expired on the platform side. Add it again under Store Settings → Credentials.

The entity count doesn't match my store — Some entities may be hidden from the API (drafts, products in an inactive channel). Compare like with like in your store admin. If the gap persists, contact support with the store name and a few SKUs that should appear.

A sync ends with failed items — The Catalog sync row shows how many failed. Open Advanced controls → the entity's tab to see the last error.