Linking Stockist to a Google Sheet

Stockist makes it easy to add store details for hundreds or thousands of locations at once by uploading a spreadsheet through our app dashboard.

It’s also possible to connect your Stockist account to a Google Sheet. Once the connection is set up, Stockist will automatically check your spreadsheet for any updates on a regular basis, making it easier to keep things updated. 

Note: This feature is available on our Premium plan and higher.

Benefits

Using a Google Sheet can be a great way to set up more sophisticated ways of managing the store details in your Stockist account:

Add multiple editors

By using the built-in sharing settings in Google Sheets, you can give staff or partners access to update your store listings without giving them full access to your Stockist account. 

Connect your CRM or other tool

Tools like Zapier and IFTTT provide a simple way to move data between thousands of apps, including Google Sheets. If your store/retailer data is in a CRM or other app supported by one of these services, you can set up a rule to automatically add a new row to your Google Sheet whenever a store is created in your CRM.

Connect multiple sheets/tabs

Stockist supports connecting multiple spreadsheets (or multiple tabs within a spreadsheet) to a single map. This can help keep things organized, and also allows configuring the settings and edit permissions for each portion of your store list separately.

Sync at any time

Stockist will check your sheet once a day for any changes and will update your map automatically if any changes are found. You can also run an additional one-off sync at any time by clicking "Sync Now" in the Stockist dashboard.

Advanced integrations

Google Sheets provides several developer integration options, which make it possible to write code to automatically keep your Google Sheet in sync with another data source. For more details, see:
  • Google Apps Script, which allows you to run JavaScript code that lives alongside your spreadsheet. This code can be triggered on a regular schedule to "pull" in data from other web-accessible places (e.g. a JSON or XML API, or a web-accessible CSV file).
  • Google Sheets Developer API, which allows you to build a standalone script in the language of your choice that runs on your own PC or server and "pushes" data into Google Sheets.

Linking your Sheet to Stockist

To link a Google Sheet with your account, follow these steps:

  1. Create a new Google Sheet in the import format supported by Stockist.

    1. If you uploaded a CSV or XLS(X) file to Google Drive, make sure to select File > Save as Google Sheets, then follow the rest of the steps with the Google Sheet. The Google developer integration that Stockist uses doesn't directly support syncing a CSV or XLS(X) file.

  2. Set your sheet’s sharing settings to Anyone with the link can view. First, click the Share button:

    Then, under General access choose Anyone with the link / Viewer:

  3. Ensure your Stockist account is on our Premium plan or above
  4. Contact our support team with a link to the spreadsheet, and we'll be happy to help get everything configured on your account
For more information on setting things up, please feel free to contact us.

Templates

To get started, you can optionally copy one of the following templates to your own Google account:

To copy the template to your own Google account:

  1. Click on a template above

  2. If needed, sign into your Google account:

  3. Choose File > Make a copy:

  4. Choose a name for the copy and the destination in your Google Drive, then click OK:

  5. You can now edit the copy of the file 

Limitations

  • This feature is available on our Premium plan and higher.
  • The sync is only one-way - details from the Google Sheet are copied into Stockist, but not vice-versa. To set up your Google Sheet initially with your existing listings, you can export your current store list from the Stockist dashboard to a CSV file under Locations > Bulk export, then copy/paste the details into a Google Sheet.
  • Currently, your account will be updated from the Google Sheet once a day. We're hoping to offer more frequent options in the future.

Technical details

Import process

Once the connection to your Google Sheet is set up, Stockist will automatically check the last modification time of your spreadsheet regularly. If the spreadsheet has been updated since the last import, Stockist will re-import the entire list from your spreadsheet.
This works exactly the same as if you had manually uploaded the list in CSV format and then deleted the previous import, except that it happens automatically and seamlessly without any downtime on your store map.
In particular, this means that you don’t need to worry about only modifying store rows that have changed. If it’s easier to copy/paste in a complete new copy of your list, that’s perfectly fine.

Tracking changes

When your Google Sheet is first connected, Stockist will remember the column headings in the first row of your spreadsheet and link them to specific fields in your Stockist account.
You can re-order your columns or add additional columns to your sheet without causing any issues. However, deleting or renaming a column will break the connection until our support team updates the connection settings, so it’s a good idea to give us a heads up if you’ve changed the format of your spreadsheet.