How Pixify integrates with Shopify

Here's a technical overview of how Pixify integrates with Shopify to offer a seamless experience for selling digital content such as images and videos.

Pre-Publish phase

When you first upload your content within the Pixify app, all data related to digital content resides exclusively on Pixify's servers during the pre-publish phase. This includes metadata, image thumbnails, and the original files you upload.

Publishing products

Once you click "Publish" on a product or multiple products within Pixify, the data is packaged and sent to Shopify. Shopify will then create a new product entry containing all this data. Thumbnails and watermarked images are also sent to Shopify. This is a one-way sync from Pixify to Shopify. Shopify won’t receive updates unless you republish changes from Pixify.

After publishing products

After publishing, a copy of all the data is stored on Shopify's servers. This ensures that the data your customers see is incredibly reliable, hosted directly from Shopify itself. Even if Pixify is removed, the products will remain in Shopify. However, the actual digital files for purchase would not be accessible as they require an active link to Pixify.

If you're selling videos, please know that Shopify has hosting limits for video thumbnails on your product pages. For that reason, Pixify hosts the video files for streaming previews in your storefront.

Making changes

If you make changes to products within Shopify - e.g. changing prices, adding tags, or changing descriptions, this will not be synced over to Pixify. Think of it as a one-way sync. If you make any changes to products within Shopify, these changes will be rewritten if you republish any changes from within Pixify. So if you need to make changes to your products, always do it within Pixify and then save and publish your changes.

Good to know: Always make changes to your products within Pixify and not from Shopify, as Pixify can overwrite these changes.

Upon checkout

When a customer initiates a checkout, Shopify requests Pixify to provide a download link for the purchased digital content. The original files are stored on Pixify's AWS storage and are sent directly to the customer upon successful payment.