01First steps
Each channel's role: who leads
Receives from Koalab, This channel leads or Independent, and what each one means.
A channel's role says who leads your products: Koalab leads the channel (“Receives from Koalab”, →), the channel leads Koalab (“This channel leads”, ←) or the channel goes its own way (“Independent”, ↔). Only one channel can lead. The arrows show in Channels and on each product's page.
See the current roles
In Organization → “Inventory”, the “Who owns the catalog” section lists your channels with their role. At the top it says who decides today: “Koalab leads” or the channel's name followed by “leads”. A newly connected channel nobody has decided on shows “Role not chosen”: in the meantime it receives from Koalab.
Mock-up: who leads, with the list of channels and their role Receives from Koalab
What you change in Koalab —on the product page, with “Upload a list” or with “Quick actions”— reaches this channel for the products it already has published, price included: your first price change replaces the one the channel has today. What someone changes inside the channel doesn't come in on its own: price and stock wait in “Pending approval”; name, description, categories and photos don't come in, and the next save in Koalab replaces them. Sales are the exception: they take stock off on their own.
This channel leads
Price and stock changes on that channel come into Koalab as soon as the channel reports them, and go on to your other channels. Name, description and photos come in with its next import and reach the other channels a few minutes later. Choose it if you'll keep working in that store and not in Koalab. When you name a new one, the previous one stops leading. The leading channel receives what you change in Koalab with no adjustments: stock splitting, the safety buffer and its price and stock rules don't apply to it. If it has any switched on, the confirmation says which stop applying; they stay saved.
Independent
It has its own catalog inside Koalab, apart from the shared one. What changes on the channel comes into Koalab and what you change in Koalab reaches it, but no other channel affects it. It shares no stock: a sale on another channel doesn't lower its stock, nor the other way round. It's the only way to connect a channel that charges in another currency. When you make a shared-catalog channel independent, its next import copies what it has published into its own catalog, and those copies count toward your plan's product cap: the confirmation tells you how many. When it goes back to the shared catalog, Koalab combines the products that have the same SKU and tells you beforehand how many get combined and how many stay as new. If it works in another currency, it can't go back.
Changing the role
Changing the role takes being the owner or an admin, and it's done in three places: Organization → “Inventory” (applied when you click “Save changes”), Channels (applied right away) and the channel's settings (always asks you to confirm). In all three, handing the lead to a channel asks you to type its name, and making it independent or joining it to the shared catalog asks you to confirm. Careful: on its next import, the leading channel replaces your catalog's price, stock and texts, and changing the role again doesn't undo those changes.
Details worth knowing
- If you apply a quick action to a single channel (the emergency exit when a channel is compromised), that channel goes on pause. If it was the leading one, it stops leading: the lead goes back to Koalab and owners and admins get an email.
- The role also decides inventory. Channels that receive from Koalab share the same stock, and in “How inventory is split” you choose how much each one sees: “Full” (each channel publishes everything; the default), “Split evenly” or “Capped”. The leading channel isn't part of the split: it publishes all the stock.
- The role is per channel, not per product. For exceptions, use the channel's rules in its settings.