Notes from the Altera team on Altera - Matrixify-Compatible Import & Export Tool for Shopify

How Fast Is Altera? Benchmarks for Large Imports, Updates, and Exports

Fri, 15 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

A lot of stores ask if Altera can handle their catalog. It can, and the rest of this post is the numbers behind that.

“I can easily import/export all my Shopify products (70,000+) and it is really easy to use & navigate.”

Postcard Finder United Kingdom · Shopify App Store

We benchmarked the operations stores run most often. That’s order exports, product exports, bulk variant updates, and first-time imports of orders and products. Each test ran multiple times across different days, so what’s below is medians with min/max ranges and not the best run we got. Headline numbers first, then the breakdown.

Altera MCP vs CLI: Which to Give Your AI Agent

Tue, 05 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000

More than 80% of Shopify merchants are already using ChatGPT for some part of their day, and a smaller-but-growing group is on Claude. So the question isn’t whether your store is going to get touched by an AI agent, it’s how you want to wire it in. Altera offers two ways. One is the Altera MCP, which plugs straight into ChatGPT, Claude, or anything else that connects to outside tools. The other is the Altera CLI, which you run in a terminal and pair with a small instructions file your AI tool reads. Both work, but they’re built for different jobs. The right one depends mostly on how many shops you run and whether the agent is allowed near production.

How to Import Orders to Shopify: A Complete CSV Guide

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000

You went looking for Import orders in the Shopify admin and there isn’t one. Shopify imports products, customers, inventory, and gift cards, but not orders. The reason isn’t a missing feature. Orders touch customers, products, inventory, payments, and notifications, so a sloppy import touches all of them, and Shopify would rather force you to choose your tooling than ship a half-safe button.

This guide covers the most common version of the job: moving order history from one Shopify store to another with a CSV.

Shopify Variant Inventory Policy: Continue vs Deny Explained

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000

You opened a variant in the Shopify admin and saw a checkbox labeled Continue selling when out of stock, tucked away under More details. Or, worse, you exported a CSV and saw a column called Variant Inventory Policy with the values continue and deny, and Shopify’s own documentation barely explains what either one does.

It’s a small setting with a big consequence: whether your store can sell what it doesn’t have. Here’s what each value actually does, when to use which, and how to flip it across the whole catalog without spending an afternoon clicking through variants one at a time.