Buyers and products
Product identifiers
Which fields on your Shopify products PO Autopilot uses to recognise a purchase-order line, and how to make matching better.
Updated
When a line quotes an item code, PO Autopilot looks for a Shopify variant carrying that code. These are the fields it looks in.
SKU
Checked first, and the one that resolves most lines. Your Shopify variant SKU is matched exactly against the code on the purchase order.
Barcode
Checked next. In Shopify, the barcode field is where UPC (Universal Product Code), EAN (European Article Number) and GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) values are stored.
This matters for buyers who order by barcode rather than by your part numbers, which is common in grocery and retail distribution.
Additional metafield identifiers
Some stores keep other identifying codes in product or variant metafields — manufacturer part numbers, legacy ERP codes, distributor references. PO Autopilot can be configured to treat specific metafields as identifiers and match against them too.
Configure these from Settings, under Matching identifiers. Choose the Shopify record type, namespace, and key; the field participates in matching on the next order that is processed.
Matching is exact
A code has to match the field’s value exactly. Near-misses are not accepted from an identifier lookup — a code that is close but not equal falls through to matching on the line’s description instead, which produces a suggestion you are asked to confirm rather than a silent match.
Duplicates prevent a match
If two variants share the same SKU or the same barcode, a line quoting that code resolves to neither. You are asked to choose.
This is worth auditing if you see the same product repeatedly asking to be chosen. A duplicate SKU created during a catalogue import is a common cause, and fixing it in Shopify fixes every future order at once.
Improving matching without changing your catalogue
You do not have to restructure your product data to make matching work. If a buyer uses codes that are not in your catalogue at all, map them once instead — see Buyer-specific product mappings.
That is usually the right answer for customer-specific part numbers. Adding every buyer’s private code to your Shopify SKUs would make your catalogue worse to solve a problem mappings already solve.