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

Shopify collection sources: how the new collections model works

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:35:00 +0000

Shopify is rolling out the biggest change to collections in years. The split between smart collections and manual collections (or custom collections) is gone. In its place, every collection is built from one or more collection sources, and a single collection can mix automated rules, hand-picked products or variants, other collections, and product groups provided by apps.

A collection source is a building block that adds products or variants to a Shopify collection. Every collection is made of one or more sources.

How to Migrate WooCommerce Products to Shopify

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The product catalogue is the part of a WooCommerce to Shopify migration that goes wrong most often. Titles and prices are easy. The trouble is in the structure: variable products that have to become Shopify variants, custom fields that have no native Shopify home, and descriptions full of WordPress shortcodes that look fine in WooCommerce and break in Shopify.

This guide covers the products, and only the products. It is one piece of the larger WooCommerce to Shopify migration guide, which walks through the whole store (orders, customers, redirects, and the rest). Here we go deep on the catalogue.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Which Should You Use (and How to Switch)

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

WooCommerce and Shopify are the two platforms most stores choose between, and the honest answer to which is better is that it depends on what you want to own. WooCommerce is a plugin you run on your own WordPress hosting; you control everything and you maintain everything. Shopify is a hosted service; you control less and maintain less. Neither is the wrong choice, but they are different trades.

This is a straight comparison, not a sales pitch. If by the end you decide to move to Shopify, the last section points you at how to bring your data across, because that is the part that takes real work.

How to Build a WooCommerce to Shopify Redirect Map (and Import It)

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

When you move from WooCommerce to Shopify, every product and category URL changes. WooCommerce lets you shape URLs however you like (/shop/blue-widget/, /store/product/blue-widget/, a flat /blue-widget/). Shopify does not. It puts products under /products/, collections under /collections/, and blog posts under /blogs/, and you cannot change those prefixes.

So the old URLs stop existing. Without redirects, every link Google has indexed, every link another site points at you with, and every bookmark a customer saved returns a 404. The rankings you built over years drain away in the weeks after launch, and the first month becomes a cleanup job instead of a launch.

Importing WooCommerce Orders into Shopify

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Order history is the WooCommerce data merchants most worry about leaving behind. It is your record of who bought what, the totals customer service needs to answer a question, and the numbers accounting reconciles against. Shopify has no “Import orders” button in the admin, because an order touches customers, products, inventory, payments, and notifications at once, so the import has to be done carefully rather than with a single click.

Ask Your Store Anything: A Read-Only Audit with Claude

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Every store builds up small problems that never announce themselves. An SEO title so long Google truncates it. A batch of images with no alt text. A sale that ended months ago but still shows a strikethrough price. None of these break anything loudly, so none of them get noticed, until a shopper or a search result notices for you.

The usual way to find them is to export everything and scroll. The faster way is to just ask. Because Altera connects to Claude, you can put questions to your store in plain language, like “which SEO titles are too long?”, and Claude answers by pulling the exact slice of data it needs. The worst thing a bad question can do is give you a useless answer.

Turn a Messy Supplier Spreadsheet into a Clean Shopify Import with Claude

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

A supplier emails you a price list. It opens fine in Excel and is wrong for Shopify in every way that matters. You upload it anyway, half the rows fail, and now you’re hand-editing a spreadsheet at 11pm, renaming headers and splitting columns by hand.

The job splits in two. One half is judgment: reading that “Colour” means an option, that four rows are one product, that $24.99 should be 24.99, and which rows are too ambiguous to touch. The other half is mechanical: converting country names, validating every row, keeping a copy you can roll back to. The first is what Claude is good at. The second is the kind of thing software should just do, the same way every time. So let Claude reshape the file, let Altera handle the import, and keep the judgment calls yourself.

How to Write Shopify SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions with AI: A Claude + Altera Guide

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 08:36:00 +0000

Every Shopify product has an SEO title and a meta description, the two lines that show up in a Google result. If you never set them, Shopify fills them in for you: the title becomes the product name, and the description becomes the first 160-ish characters of your body copy, usually cut off mid-sentence. That’s fine on launch day and mediocre forever after.

Those two fields aren’t really separate from your metafields. They are metafields. Shopify keeps them as global.title_tag and global.description_tag, and Altera reads and writes them as the SEO Title and SEO Description columns. So “fix our SEO fields” is a metafield import, and writing 200 short, on-brand, character-limited lines from existing product copy is exactly the kind of job worth handing to an AI.

How to Import and Export Shopify Products With Linked Variant Options

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

If you’ve added color swatches or standardized materials to your Shopify products, you’ve used linked variant options, whether you knew the term or not. Instead of a plain-text option value like “Black”, the option points at a metaobject entry that carries structured data: a color code, a swatch image, a taxonomy reference. The option becomes a reference to a single source of truth for all “Black” variants and you can update it from a single place.

Altera/Matrixify Metafields: Generate a Ready-to-Use Import Template from Your Store

Thu, 21 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000

If you’ve ever tried to import metafields into Shopify with Matrixify or Altera, you already know the import itself isn’t the hard part. The hard part is getting the column headers and value formats exactly right. One wrong namespace, one off-format date, one mistyped measurement object, and the whole row fails.

The new metafield import template tool in Altera takes care of that for you. It downloads your store’s actual metafield definitions and produces a ready-to-use Excel file with every column laid out correctly, pre-filled with example values that show you exactly what each data type should look like. There’s a 3-minute walkthrough on YouTube if you want to see it before reading.

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.