Instant Shopify

Built an automated product onboarding system that transforms a single submission form into a fully configured Shopify draft product, complete with variants, media assets, compliance documents, and operational tracking.

The Shelf NYC was spending significant time manually collecting product information, organizing assets, configuring variants, and creating Shopify products before new brands could be launched.

The Shelf NYC helps emerging food and beverage brands get discovered through its retail platform. Every new brand onboarding required a substantial amount of manual operational work before products could appear in Shopify.

Teams needed to collect product information, download images, organize files, configure variants, upload media, create Shopify products, attach barcodes and SKUs, and communicate progress internally. While none of these tasks were particularly difficult, they were repetitive, time-consuming, and prone to human error.

To streamline the onboarding process, I built Instant Shopify: an automated product onboarding system that converts a single brand submission into a nearly complete Shopify product listing.

Brands submit a single onboarding form containing product details, pricing information, SKUs, barcodes, product imagery, logos, compliance documents, and inventory information. From there, the workflow takes over automatically.

The system organizes brand assets in Google Drive, processes uploaded files, generates Shopify-ready product records, and creates products in Draft status. Depending on the product configuration, the workflow intelligently determines whether the submission requires variants and routes the product through the appropriate creation path.

One of the more complex aspects of the project involved supporting products with multiple variants while maintaining a simple submission experience for vendors. The workflow automatically creates and configures Shopify variants, associates SKU and barcode information, applies pricing data, and ensures that products are structured correctly inside Shopify.

To support these requirements, I built custom JavaScript processing steps that parse complex file-upload payloads and transform form submissions into data structures Shopify can consume reliably. The system was also designed to gracefully handle optional uploads, missing files, and varying product configurations without breaking the workflow.

The workflow supports products with up to three option groups and automatically creates the appropriate variant structure inside Shopify. It also handles media uploads, inventory metadata, compliance documents, and product-specific assets while maintaining a streamlined experience for both vendors and internal operators.

Once a product has been created, operational notifications are sent into Slack, giving the team immediate visibility into onboarding activity. Additional workflows monitor product status changes and can trigger downstream processes as products move from Draft to Active.

The result is a self-service onboarding pipeline that reduces nearly an hour of manual work per product submission. Vendors can submit a single form, and within minutes a fully configured Shopify product exists in Draft mode, ready for final review and publication.

• Reduced product onboarding time from nearly 1 hour to a matter of minutes
• Automated product creation, asset management, and variant configuration
• Eliminated repetitive manual data entry
• Standardized product onboarding across all vendors
• Created a scalable intake process for growing product catalogs
• Improved operational visibility through Slack-based notifications