Sales channel
A sales channel is any place your products are offered to buyers, from your own online store to eBay, Amazon or Google, each with its own rules.
What it means
A shop can sell in several places at once. Its own website is one sales channel, and eBay, Amazon, Google and social networks are others. Shopify’s developer documentation describes channels that connect a shop “to surfaces outside Shopify”. They range from “traffic-driving channels like Google and Meta” to “marketplaces like Amazon that have their own checkout”.1
Every channel takes the same product in its own shape, with its own limits. Shopify, for one, warns that some themes, apps and sales channels “might not support more than 100 variants”, so a range that imports into the store can still be too big for a channel.2
Think of it like this
Sales channels are like the different counters of one business: the shop floor, the phone line, the stall at the Saturday market. The stock is the same, but each counter needs it presented in its own way.
For example
A hoodie in 4 sizes and 3 colours is 12 variants. A Shopify product CSV takes them as 12 rows sharing one handle, Google as 12 products sharing one item_group_id, and eBay as one listing with variations.345 One set of facts, three shapes.
Why it matters
Patch each channel by hand and the versions drift apart: a size corrected on eBay stays wrong on Google. Build every channel’s version from one clean catalogue, and a fix made once reaches them all.
Not to be confused with
A sales channel is a wider idea than a marketplace. A marketplace such as eBay or Amazon is one kind of sales channel, and your own website and Google are others.
Sources
- Shopify.dev. Apps as sales channels.
- Shopify Help Center. Adding variants.
- Shopify Help Center. Using CSV files to import and export products.
- Google Merchant Center Help. Item group ID [item_group_id].
- eBay UK Seller Centre. Item specifics.