Overview
Dashboard
The dashboard opens with a count of everything in your catalog and everything missing from it, and clicking any count opens the records behind it.
The dashboard is the screen you get when you open the PIM. It counts your catalog and puts each count on a card of its own. You get to see how big your catalog is, and where it is thin, without opening a single product.
Some cards count what you have, like Total Products and Total Brands. Others count what is missing, like Products without Assets and Uncategorized. That second kind is the one worth your time, because every card is a link. Click one and you open the list of exactly the records that produced the number. A card reading 240 is 240 things to fix, one click away.
You get to it from Home, the first entry in the sidebar down the left. The bar across the top of the screen calls the same screen Dashboard, and so does your browser tab. You have nothing here to set up. The sections and their cards are fixed, and they are already counting for you.
Before you start
The numbers cover one organization
Every count on this screen is for the organization named at the top of the sidebar, above the entries. If you are in more than one, click that name and pick another. The whole screen recounts for the one you picked. No card ever adds two organizations together, so a number that looks far too small is worth checking against the name up there. You will find that switcher covered in the interface.
Your role changes nothing on this screen
The dashboard has no permission of its own. Whatever your role is, you see the same sections, the same cards and the same numbers as everyone else in your organization. So a number you cannot explain is never one your role is hiding part of. Where your role does show up is on the list a card opens, and you set roles in team, roles and permissions.
How to clear a gap the dashboard found
Open the dashboard
Click
Home, the first entry in the sidebar down the left. The screen opens on the section labeledCatalog overview, and the other nine sections follow under it as you scroll.Find a card counting something missing
Scroll to the
Brandssection and read the card labeledProducts without Brand. Every section has at least one card like it, and each one counts a gap in your catalog instead of a total.Click the card
The whole card is a link. It opens your products table with the matching filter already applied. The rows you get are the products that card counted, and nothing else.
Fix the rows you opened
Click a row to open that product and give it a brand. To fix several at once, check the boxes at the left of the rows. The toolbar above the table turns into a selection bar, and bulk actions covers what you can do from there.
Go back and read the card again
Click
Homein the sidebar again. The card has already recounted, so your number is lower than the one you clicked.
That is the whole loop, and it is the same one for every gap card on the screen. Read a number you do not like, click it, and fix what opens.
Everything below explains the ten sections one at a time, then what moves your numbers and what leaves them alone. You do not need any of it to use a card.
Every option in detail
The screen gives you ten sections with 45 cards between them. Nine of the sections count your catalog as it stands right now. The tenth is Recent uploads · last 7 days, the only one with a time window on it, and it is at the bottom.
You have nothing here to search, filter, sort or date. The sections are fixed, the cards inside them are fixed, and the order never changes. A card stays where you last saw it.
How to read a card
Every card you see is a label and a number, and nothing else. You get no hover text, no arrow and no small print, so what a card means has to come from its label and from this page.
A number over 999 is shortened. 1,200 shows as 1.2K, and 1,500,000 shows as 1.5M. On a large catalog you are reading a rounded number and not an exact one. The four cards under Recent uploads · last 7 days are the exception. You always read those four in full.
One card shows a second number. Total Variants, in Catalog overview, prints the average number of variants across your products that have them, beside the count. A variant is one buyable version of your product, such as one size or one color. You only see that average once at least one of your products has variants.
How the cards add up
Some of your cards are slices of the same total and some are not. Knowing which is which saves you a lot of arithmetic.
A without card is Total Products minus the with card beside it. Products without Brand is Total Products minus Products with Brand. Your assets, categories, tags and specifications work the same way. That answer comes from a subtraction and is never counted on its own, so your pair adds up to Total Products every time.
An Unused card stands outside that pair. Unused Brands counts brands and not products. So it can be larger than the number of products you have, and it reads zero on a catalog where nothing has a brand yet. The same goes for Unused Categories, Unused Tags and the three Unused cards under Specifications.
Which groups of cards add up to a total, and which ones only look like they should
Three groups look like they should add up and do not. Root Categories and Leaf Categories overlap, because a category with nothing above it and nothing below it is both at once. The four Pricing coverage cards overlap too, since one of your variants with four prices on it is counted four times. And Total Units is a sum of stock instead of a count of anything, so it is in no group.
Where a card takes you
Every one of the 45 cards is a link. Click one and you open a list with the filter that matches the card already applied. It is a real filter. The Filter button above the list shows you how many filters are on. You can widen them or clear them from there like any other, which filters covers.
Which list opens depends on what the card counts.
Three cards open somewhere you would not guess from the label.
Total Variantsopens your products that have variants, and not a list of variants. Products are what that table lists for you, and it is the same listProducts with Variantsopens.Total Unitsopens your products sorted by stock, highest first, with no filter on it at all. A sum gives you no rows of its own to filter down to.Not Trackedopens the products with at least one variant that has no stock number. That is the nearest a list of products can get to a count of variants.
A card that counts variants opens a list of products, so the two numbers differ. Every card under Pricing coverage and Inventory counts variants. One product can have many variants, so 1,200 variants With Price might be 400 rows on the list that opens. Neither number is wrong, and variants explains why one product is more than one thing to price.
What the Catalog overview cards count
Catalog overview is the first section on the screen, and it answers how big your catalog is.
An option is a choice like size or color, and each combination of your options is one variant. A product of yours with no options at all is what the second card calls simple.
Total Variants is the card that surprises people. It leaves out the single variant under every simple product, so it is not your total number of sellable items. What it does tell you is how much of your catalog is built out of options, and the average beside it tells you how deep those options go.
What the Product status cards count
Product status is the second section, and it splits your catalog by the status on each product.
Those four are the whole list of statuses your product can have, which is why they always come to Total Products. You set the status on the product itself, and products shows you where.
What the Pricing coverage cards count
Pricing coverage counts variants and not products, because your prices are stored on variants.
Read these as four separate questions about your catalog and not as a breakdown. One of your variants with a cost and a price is counted in the first card and in the second, so nothing here adds up to a whole. What you get from each card is how far one of your four money fields has been filled in, and pricing explains what each field is for.
These four count more variants than Total Variants does. They cover every variant you own, the single one under each simple product included. Total Variants leaves those out. So With Price can print a bigger number than Total Variants on the same catalog, and that is two cards answering two different questions.
What the Inventory cards count
Inventory counts variants as well, over the same wider set of your variants that Pricing coverage uses.
The first three account for all of your variants between them, because a variant is above zero, at zero, or not tracked. The difference between the last two matters. In Stock is a count of variants and Total Units is a count of units, so 40 variants can be 4,000 units. Where a stock number comes from, and why some of your variants have none, is covered in inventory.
What the Assets cards count
Assets counts the files in your library and the products using them.
A file you are still uploading is in none of the three. That keeps Total Assets equal to what your asset library shows you, instead of running ahead of it.
Products with Assets counts any kind of file you attach, and not only an image. A product of yours whose only attachment is a PDF spec sheet is counted here. So a high number is not proof that your products have pictures.
What the Brands cards count
Brands is the first of four sections about the things you organize your catalog with, and all four are shaped the same way.
Unused Brands opens your brands list filtered to a Products count of 0. That is your cleanup list: brands someone created, or an import created, and nothing ever used. You will find what to do with them in brands.
What the Categories cards count
Categories has six cards instead of four, because your category tree has a shape that a brand does not.
The first card is labeled Total and not Total Categories. It is the one place on the screen where a label leans on the section heading above it.
Root Categories and Leaf Categories are not two halves of Total. A category with no parent and no children is counted in both. A category in the middle of your tree is counted in neither, so the two numbers can overlap or leave a gap. How you build the tree is covered in categories.
What the Tags cards count
You read Tags the same way you read Brands.
A high Untagged Products is not a problem on its own, because a tag is optional in a way a price is not. Read it next to how much you actually use tags, which tags goes into.
What the Specifications cards count
Specifications has eight cards, the most of any section, because a specification is three things inside each other. A group has definitions, a definition has values, and your product has a value.
Your three Unused cards test three different levels of that chain. Reading them top to bottom tells you where your setup stopped, and specifications covers building one.
Why a definition full of values can still count as unused
Unused Definitions asks whether your definition has any values defined under it. Unused Values asks whether a product has picked one of them. So a definition with 40 values and no product of yours using any of them is absent from Unused Definitions and puts 40 into Unused Values.
Read the three of them as one sentence. Unused Groups means no one finished setting it up, Unused Definitions means no one gave it options, and Unused Values means no one applied it.
What the Recent uploads cards count
The last section is labeled Recent uploads · last 7 days. Those 7 days are the only time window anywhere on this screen.
Click any of those four cards and you open your imports or your exports list. It uses the same two things the count used: the status, and the same 7-day boundary. So the rows you get are the ones the card counted, and never a wider set.
Why an import you ran this week can be missing from these cards
The 7 days run from when you started the import or the export, not from when it ended. A long import you started 8 days ago is outside the window whatever happened to it since, even if it finished this morning.
Two more things are absent from all four cards. An import or an export you canceled has no card of its own, and neither does one that is still running. So a busy afternoon can leave all four reading lower than the work you did. Both imports and exports have a status column that answers this properly.
Limits
What the dashboard cannot do
When the numbers change
The dashboard recounts itself while you are on it. There is no refresh button on it and nothing you have to reload.
A catalog change recounts the whole screen. Change one of your products, a variant, a brand, a category, a tag or a specification anywhere in the PIM. About a second later, every card you can see counts again. A run of changes collapses into one recount, so a bulk edit across 5,000 products does not leave your screen flickering.
Two kinds of change do nothing here. A file you upload moves nothing, and an import or an export finishing moves nothing either. The three cards under Assets and the four under Recent uploads · last 7 days wait for something in your catalog to move, or for you to reload the page.
Finishing an import is the case that catches people. A message pops up to tell you it is done and Imports Completed stays unchanged, because it is waiting on a catalog change or a reload.
A reload counts everything again for you, those seven cards included, so nothing stays behind for long. If a number looks stale, reload the page before you go looking for a real problem.
A recount that fails leaves your last numbers where they are. No card blanks out, and no error appears in place of a number. So what you are reading is either current or the last good count, and reloading is the only way to tell.
When something goes wrong
A card and the list it opens show different counts
Nearly always this is a variant card opening a list of products, which is covered under Where a card takes you above. Two other cases are worth your time.
Total Units opens an unfiltered list, so you get your whole catalog sorted by stock. And a card whose count moved between your reading it and your clicking it opens the list as it is now, not as the card was.
A number did not move after you did something
Work through it in this order.
If a reload does not move it either, your change was not saved. Open the list the card links to and look for the record you expected to find there.
Every card reads zero
A new organization reads zero on all 45 cards until you put something in it. You get no message and no getting-started panel, so there is nothing broken to fix. The screen has nothing of yours to count and says so with zeros. Loading your first products through imports fills it.
The screen shows an error instead of the cards
A first load that cannot read your counts gives you Something went wrong, with a Try Again button under it that you can click. Nothing on the dashboard writes anything to your catalog, so retrying is always safe and never changes a record.
Where to go next
Reports
Where a date range is set, and how a report goes deeper than a count.
Products
The list most cards open, and what you can do once you are there.
Filters
The filter a card gives you, and how to widen it or clear it.
The interface
The sidebar, the organization switcher and the frame around this screen.