Example: Cloudinary-Shopify Zap

Note
The Cloudinary-Shopify Zap described here is not an official integration with Shopify. It demonstrates one possible example of how you can take advantage of Zapier's capabilities to upload your Cloudinary images to Shopify automatically.

On this page:

Overview

Shopify is an eCommerce platform that enables you to set up your own online shop. It offers a suite of services including payments, marketing, shipping and customer engagement tools to simplify the process of running an online store for small merchants.

Key to online retail is having relevant images portraying your products. By retrieving these from Cloudinary, you can maintain a single source of truth for all your assets, with all the DAM benefits that Cloudinary offers.

After you've performed the one-time configuration of the Cloudinary-Shopify Zap as described in the video tutorial below, you can assign individual Cloudinary images to a Shopify product, then trigger the automatic upload of the images to Shopify by adding contextual metadata and tags as follows:

Contextual metadata Tags
Key: productid Value: <product ID> <product ID>

toshopify

For example, here, the selected image in the Cloudinary media library is assigned to the product with ID 4923101380653 in Shopify:

Cloudinary image with tags and metadata

When you add the toshopify tag, it triggers the Zap to upload the image to the specified product page in Shopify:

Shopify product with image uploaded

Note
This Zap only works for images, due to limitations with Shopify's API at the time that this example Zap was created. Shopify's newer GraphQL API could be used to allow videos to be uploaded in a similar way in the future.

Configuring the Shopify Zap

Download the Cloudinary-Shopify Zap import file, then watch this video to see how to import and configure it:

Imported metadata

When a Cloudinary image is uploaded to Shopify, it includes all metadata and tags:

  • Alt text for the image in Shopify is taken from the Description contextual metadata entry in Cloudinary.
  • Any tags that are applied in Cloudinary are transferred across to Shopify, aggregated to the product.
  • The value of the position key, set in the contextual metadata in Cloudinary, is used to specify the position of the image in Shopify's product gallery. For example, setting position to 3 places the image third in the gallery. If you want the image to be the main image that is shown in the catalog, set position to 1.
    Note
    When Cloudinary's product gallery is used instead of Shopify's, the assets are ordered alphanumerically by public ID.

See also

Guide to Building the Ultimate E-Commerce Website

 
You may also want to take a look at Cloudinary's five-chapter Guide to Building the Ultimate E-Commerce Website. The guide includes suggestions by e-commerce and technical experts on how to build a versatile marketplace by selecting automated e-commerce and CMS platforms that help you create, modify, and deploy adaptable user experiences.

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