Channels is currently in beta. We'd love your feedback — contact us and let us know what you think.
Only Admins and Content Managers can manage Channels.
Your product data doesn't just live in Lingo. It ends up on retailer sites, in partner catalogs, and in stores. Channels help you keep track of all of it, so you always know which products each destination carries and whether their copy is up to date.
What is a channel?
A channel is a named destination for your product data — a retailer, an online store, a distributor, or any partner you share products with. Each channel keeps track of:
Which variants it carries — the specific SKUs you've added to the channel
Whether its data is current — whether anything has changed since the last time you confirmed the channel was up to date
For example, Aero sells the Ridgeline Jacket through two retail partners, so they set up a channel for each: Summit Outfitters and Trailhead Co. When Aero updates the jacket's description or swaps in a new photo, Lingo flags the change on both channels.
How channels work
Channels track changes — they don't send data anywhere on their own. The workflow looks like this:
Add the variants a channel carries
Update your product data in Lingo as usual
Review what's changed for each channel
Update the destination — send the new data to the retailer or update your store yourself
Mark it in sync in Lingo to confirm the channel is up to date
Lingo doesn't currently push data to external systems. Channels tell you what needs updating and when — you stay in control of when and how the destination is updated.
What you can see in a channel
Each channel has three tabs:
Updated — variants that need your attention: changed, newly added, or retired
Inventory — everything the channel currently carries
Catalog — variants you could add to the channel
Every variant has a status — like In Sync, Updated, or Retired — so you can see at a glance where things stand. See the Channel Status Reference for what each one means.
Where to find Channels
Go to Products → Settings → Channels to see all of your channels, their statuses, and the market each one is limited to, if any.
You can also see which channels carry a product from the Channels card on the product page.
Before you start
A few things to know before you set up your first channel:
Only Available variants can be added to a channel. New variants start as Draft, so set a variant's Availability to Available when it's ready to share.
Everything on the product is shared with the channel. Every field value on a variant you add is part of what the channel sees, so keep internal-only information like cost or margin out of your product fields.
Channels can be limited to a market. If you use markets, you can create a channel for a single region.