Not every Shopify product belongs in your inventory system. Samples, retired seasonal items, drafts you are still writing, and archived products can clutter your catalog, your forecasts and your purchasing screens. Organizely lets you set never-import rules so those products stay out, and gives you a review queue for the ones that were already imported before you wrote the rule.
What you need
A Shopify integration. Never-import rules apply to Shopify integrations only.
No plan requirement.
Anyone who can open the integration can see and edit the rules, and read the review queue. Running a scan, and confirming an exclusion, a re-include or a delete, needs an Admin role. That is tied to the role itself: there is no separate permission toggle for it. Without an Admin role you will see the line "You can review this queue, but the admin role is required to run scans or make changes.", and the action buttons are disabled with an "Admin role required" tooltip.
Where to set the rules
Go to Integrations > Manage and click Manage on your Shopify integration.
Open the Settings tab.
In the Inbound Sync card (the one badged "Shopify → Organizely"), expand the Products section.
Enable Product Sync has to be switched on. The Never-import rules block sits at the bottom of that section.
The two kinds of rule
You can exclude products by tag, by Shopify product status, or both. A product is skipped if it matches any rule.
Excluded tags
Type a Shopify product tag into the Excluded tags field (placeholder "e.g. organizely-exclude") and press Enter or click Add. Tags appear as removable amber chips, and the field accepts up to 255 characters.
Tag matching is exact and case insensitive: it is an exact match, ignoring capitalization, against the product's Shopify tags. As the field puts it, a tag like "sample" does not match "sample-sale". If you want a family of products excluded, give them all one shared tag in Shopify rather than relying on partial matches.
Excluded statuses
Under Excluded statuses there are two checkboxes:
Don't import draft products
Don't import archived products
Active products can never be excluded by status. A draft product that matches a status rule is imported automatically once it becomes active in Shopify.
Preview before you save
Once at least one rule is set, a Preview impact button (with an eye icon) appears. Click it to see what your rules would catch. The preview splits the count into:
Products that are already imported, which will need review in the Exclusions tab.
Products that are not yet imported, which future imports will simply skip.
It also lists up to 20 matched products with the rule that matched each one, and warns you with "High impact: these rules match a large share of your catalog" when the rules match more than 25 products, or more than 10% of your store's products if that is the larger number.
If you edit the rules after previewing, the preview is marked out of date and prompts you to preview again before saving. Do that, so you are saving a result you have actually seen.
Tag rules need your store's product tag data to have been brought into Organizely first. Until it has, a tag-rule preview refuses to run and tells you to run Index Products on the integration's Details tab, and a tag-rule scan refuses too. On the Exclusions tab this refusal comes with a Refresh product data button that does the same job: start it, and the scan runs automatically once it finishes. Rules that use only statuses are unaffected.
When the rules apply
Never-import rules apply to every way products enter Organizely:
The initial import when you first connect the store.
Import All Products re-runs.
Importing a single product by hand.
Live sync as products change in Shopify.
In other words, the rules are not a one-time import filter. They keep matching products out on an ongoing basis.
Nothing that is already in Organizely is removed automatically. Saving your rules kicks off a catalog scan, and anything already imported that now matches lands in a review queue for you to confirm.
The Exclusions review queue
Open the Exclusions tab on the integration page (the tabs are Details, Products, Exclusions, Settings, Webhook Logs, Inventory Sync Logs and Health). The page is headed Exclusion review.
At the top you will see a Scan now button and a status line: "Last scan: …" (with a summary such as "Scanned 4,120 products, 37 matching"), "Scanning your catalog…", or "Run a scan to check every product against your exclusion rules."
Below that are two cards.
Exclusion candidates
Products that are already in Organizely and now match one of your rules. Each row names the product, shows an amber chip with the rule that matched it, and carries a short summary of what already references it, for example open purchase orders, orders, stock on hand, adjustments, stocktakes, transfers, work orders or bill of materials connections. Row actions are Exclude, Delete and Skip.
Tick several rows and a bar appears with Exclude selected and Skip selected. For a large selection, Organizely asks you to type the number of selected products into a confirmation box before it will run the action. When there is nothing waiting you will see "No products waiting for exclusion review".
Confirming an exclusion:
Archives the product's variants and hides the product from your catalog, search, product pickers, forecasting and the public API.
Preserves order and purchase order history, so your reporting stays intact.
Changes nothing in Shopify.
For a product with no references at all, Delete is offered instead. It opens a Permanently delete product? confirmation which spells out that the product will be permanently deleted from Organizely and stays untouched in Shopify. On rows that do have references, Delete is disabled with a tooltip saying so.
Re-include candidates
If a product stops matching your rules, because you removed the tag in Shopify, activated a draft, or edited the rules, it shows up here. Row actions are Re-include and Skip, with Re-include selected and Skip selected for a multi-row selection. Confirming a re-include restores its variants and re-imports fresh data from Shopify. When there is nothing to restore you will see "Nothing to restore".
Products that were never imported in the first place are not part of this queue. Once they stop matching, they come in through the normal import paths: a product change in Shopify, or your next import run.
Results you may see
When an action finishes, Organizely reports a count of the products it processed and then a message for anything it could not complete. Outcomes are Excluded, Deleted, Re-included, Skipped and Failed, plus these cases:
Nothing to do, because the situation changed since the product appeared in the queue.
Blocked, because the product is part of a bill of materials or variant connection.
Blocked, because the product is linked to more than one integration.
Blocked, because a SKU is now held by another variant.
Excluded, but some variants were created at the same time and are still live.
A blocked row is telling you the product is still in use somewhere, so resolve that connection first. Rows blocked by a bill of materials connection also carry a badge on the row itself and a disabled Exclude button.
The queue loads up to 50 items at a time. When more are waiting, a notice tells you how many are pending and offers a Contact support link that writes to support@organizely.io with the subject "Bulk product exclusion", so the team can run a very large backlog with you.
Spotting excluded products elsewhere
On the integration's Products tab you can filter by Excluded or Pending re-include (each shows a count when there are any), and each affected row carries a reason chip: an amber Excluded badge naming the rule that matched, such as tag "sample" or status: draft, or a blue Pending re-include badge. The Import Product button is disabled on those rows, with a tooltip explaining why.
If you open an excluded product's own page directly, for example from a bookmark or a saved link, an amber banner tells you it is excluded, names the rule, and links you straight to the integration's Exclusions tab. Excluded products are filtered out of the ordinary Products list, so you will not stumble across them there.
A note on the Stocky import
The Stocky import has its own What to import selection, which lets you choose whether a run pulls Suppliers, Purchase orders and Stock adjustments. That lives in a separate area (Integrations > Stocky Import > Import from API) and it controls what a one-off migration run pulls, rather than which products Shopify sends you on an ongoing basis. See the Stocky import documentation for how to use it.
Need help?
If a product is not behaving the way your rules say it should, or you have a large exclusion backlog to work through, email support@organizely.io and the team will help.