Automating the creation of Looks

While manually creating and managing Looks in the dashboard is one way to build them, Tagalys also supports automating the creation of Looks using Shopify metafields. This is especially useful for merchants who already tag related products together in Shopify and want those groupings to translate directly into Looks, without recreating them manually.

This automation is possible if the merchant can provide a metafield of type list.product_reference.

What is a Shopify list.product_reference metafield?

A list.product_reference metafield is a Shopify metafield type that lets a merchant link a product to a list of other products. Instead of storing plain text or numbers, this metafield stores references to other products in the catalog — for example, a "Complete the Look" metafield on a dress that references the bag, shoes, and earrings that go with it. Since it stores actual product references (not just text), Tagalys can read this metafield and understand exactly which products should be grouped together for each product in the catalog.

Types of automated Look creation

Once a merchant provides the relevant metafield, there are two ways Tagalys can use it to create Looks:

One-time setup

With this method, the merchant provides the metafield, and Tagalys performs a one-time sync. For each product, we go through the metafield and group all the referenced products together as a Look. These Looks can then be used in collections just like manually created Looks.

Note: This is a one-time setup. If the product references in the metafield change in the future, the Looks will continue to reflect the original references at the time of the sync.

Periodic Sync

With this method, the merchant provides the metafield and Looks are created just as they are in the One-time setup, but Tagalys syncs the metafield at periodic intervals. If the product references are updated in Shopify, the corresponding Looks are automatically updated to reflect those changes.

Note: When periodic sync is enabled and product references are modified/removed, the old Looks based on the deleted/modified references will be removed from the system unless they are already used in a collection. In which case, the Looks will not be removed.