Where your data comes from: the Data Flow page

One owner per kind of data: catalogue, price, stock, orders. See who owns what and why, and move it to MarketplaceHub, a store, a feed or your own system.

One owner for each kind of data

MarketplaceHub keeps four kinds of data, and each has exactly one owner — the place its value is set, or the place an action is expected to come from. Everything else receives it.

• Catalogue — titles, descriptions, images and attributes.
• Price — the selling price of every listing.
• Stock — how many units you have.
• Orders — who ships, cancels and refunds an order after it arrives.

The owner can be MarketplaceHub itself (you edit it here and every marketplace receives it), a connected marketplace (that shop decides and MarketplaceHub copies the value in), your file feed (the scheduled Price & Stock Sync sets it), or your own system pushing over the API. Price and stock can be owned by any of these; the catalogue by MarketplaceHub or a marketplace; orders only by MarketplaceHub or your own system.

The Data Flow page

Open Data Flow in the left menu. The top row names the owner of each kind of data, and a small tag says how MarketplaceHub knows:

• You chose this — you set it with the Change wizard.
• Set for you when this changed — MarketplaceHub recorded it after something happened to a connection: a Shopify store was uninstalled, or a marketplace was disconnected.
• Worked out from your settings — nobody chose; the answer comes from what is switched on today. A Shopify or Etsy real-time stock sync makes that store the owner of price and stock, and the marketplace an import journey pulls from owns the catalogue. With no sync on, MarketplaceHub owns price and stock. Orders are MarketplaceHub’s until you choose otherwise, because nothing about them runs on its own.
• No single owner — your catalogue is pulled from more than one place, so MarketplaceHub does not guess.

Below that, the map shows which connections write into MarketplaceHub and which it publishes to. A store can be on both sides — an Etsy shop you import from is also a shop you publish to. Orders always come in and are never sent out, whoever is expected to act on them — so the Orders arrow on the map only ever points towards MarketplaceHub.

The same picture is on Home: each marketplace card carries four chips — Catalogue, Price, Stock, Orders — with an arrow for the direction and a filled chip for a kind of data that store owns. Hover a chip to read the sentence in full.

Why Amazon and eBay cannot own price or stock

For a marketplace to own price or stock, something has to send every change into MarketplaceHub as it happens. Shopify does that with a webhook and Etsy with a scheduled check; Amazon and eBay have neither, so they are not offered. Both can own the catalogue, because a catalogue import is something every marketplace supports.

Who ships your orders

An order is always created by the marketplace that took it. What the Orders owner decides is who is expected to ship, cancel and refund it afterwards — you, working the Orders page, or your own system over the API. No marketplace can be the owner, because whether a marketplace ships an order is decided one order at a time rather than for your whole account.

Nothing is ever blocked. If your own system owns them, the Orders page still lets you ship from here — it asks first, so you know your system was expected to. If MarketplaceHub owns them, a shipment pushed over the API is accepted and the response says the same thing. The one exception is an order the marketplace fulfils itself, such as an Amazon FBA order: those cannot be shipped, cancelled or refunded from here at all, because Amazon is doing it.

Changing the owner

Press Change on any of the four rows. The wizard has four steps:

1. Data — which kind of data you are moving. The other three stay exactly as they are.
2. New source — MarketplaceHub, a connected marketplace, your file feed or your own system. A marketplace that cannot own that kind of data is listed greyed out, with the reason.
3. Check — what stops, what starts, and what disagrees right now. For price, the wizard compares the new owner's prices with every other channel's over a sample of your products and lists the biggest differences, with a download of the full list. If the new owner has no price for more than a tenth of the products checked, the wizard refuses to continue and says how many are missing — an owner that cannot price most of your catalogue would leave those listings frozen. Moving price to MarketplaceHub offers a fix: seed the MarketplaceHub price from one of your marketplaces. Seeding fills in only the products that have no MarketplaceHub price yet, and changes nothing any listing currently shows.
4. Confirm — the move, stated in full. Nothing is written until you press Switch.

What "demoted" means

When you move a kind of data away from a marketplace, that marketplace is not disconnected. It stops being asked and starts being told:

• Its real-time sync stops. Etsy's scheduled checks end; Shopify's webhooks and its 30-minute catch-up are ignored.
• It keeps receiving everything MarketplaceHub publishes, exactly as before.
• Changes made on that marketplace no longer reach MarketplaceHub, and are overwritten the next time MarketplaceHub publishes.

For the catalogue, only Shopify has an automatic sync to stop. A pull you start yourself — from a journey's Pull button or a card's Sync from … action — always runs, and tells you first who owns the catalogue and that the pull can overwrite edits made here.

Editing something another owner controls

Nothing stops you. A price or stock change you push with a feed or over the API is applied, and you are warned — in the import's log, or in the API response — that the owner's next sync will put it back. Change the owner on the Data Flow page if you want the value to stay.