The back-catalogue import

Attachments are not retroactive on their own. An order placed before you attached a file to that product produced no download, because there was nothing to match. Backfill is how you fix that for a whole back catalogue at once.

It is part of the paid plans that include it. See plans and storage.

1. Sync your order history

Press Sync order history. The app asks Shopify to export your past orders and works them into a list of every product you have ever sold, with how many orders and how many buyers each had, and when it first and last sold.

This can take a while on a large store, and the page tells you where it has got to. You can run it again later to pick up anything new; the list is updated in place rather than duplicated.

Products you have since deleted in Shopify still appear, identified by their title, because their buyers are still real.

2. Map products to files

For each product that should deliver something, say what its past buyers receive. Two ways:

• Files you picked. Choose files from your library directly. Picking files here also attaches them to the product, so future orders grant them too.
• Files from a product. Point at a product that already delivers the right thing. The run then resolves that product’s files when it happens, so changing the files on it later flows through without remapping.

You can map several products at once with Map selected to files, and undo that with Unmap selected.

3. Ignore what should not be there

Most back catalogues are mostly physical products, sold-out one-offs and things nobody should be getting a file for. Ignore selected takes rows out of the working set: they are hidden from the default views and skipped by runs, and Restore selected puts them back.

Doing this first makes the rest of the job much smaller.

4. Run it

Back-fill past orders starts a run over the mappings you have selected.

• From date and To date narrow the run. Leave them blank to cover your whole order history. They are whole days, in UTC.
• Email these buyers their download links decides whether the run is loud or quiet. On, it sends one email per order using your delivery template. Off, it adds the downloads silently and you send them later from the Orders page.
• Preview this run tells you what it would do before it does it.

Runs are resumable and report what they did: orders scanned, downloads created, downloads skipped, emails sent. A download that already exists for an order and file is skipped rather than duplicated, so re-running a job is safe.

Worth knowing before you email a back catalogue

Sending thousands of people an unexpected email about a purchase from years ago is a real decision, not a technical one. Two habits worth having:

• Run it quietly first, with the email option off, and check a handful of orders on the Orders page. Then release them.
• Narrow with From date and run in batches, rather than mailing the whole history in one go.

Back-fill downloads carry your current limits and expiry, the same as any other download.