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Choosing your inventory source

Your inventory source is where new books come from. Bookhead enriches books from that source and writes them to your Shopify store. Choosing a source is the first decision you make after installing the app.

There are three sources, listed here in the order most bookstores use them.

This is the primary, recommended way to bring in new titles. When you receive a shipment from a distributor such as Ingram, you also receive a file describing what's in it. You give that file to Bookhead, and Bookhead creates an enriched, ready-to-sell product for every book in the shipment.

This is the fastest way to add many books at once and the workflow most stores run day to day. See Importing a distributor file.

2. Manual book creation​

When you only need to add a book or two — a single new arrival, a special order — you can create products by hand. You provide a few details (the ISBN, quantity, and price) and Bookhead fills in the cover and bibliographic data for you. See Creating book products manually.

3. An external in-store sales system​

If you already track inventory in a separate in-store sales system, Bookhead can take new titles from that system as your source. Setting this up requires coordination, so contact [email protected] to arrange it.

Shopify is not a source of new inventory​

It's worth being precise about this, because it's the most common point of confusion:

Bookhead does not treat your Shopify store as a source of new books. New inventory always originates from one of the three sources above. Bookhead reads your Shopify catalog only to keep things in sync — to recognize books you already have, avoid duplicates, and update the right product when something changes.

For exactly how that read-and-sync behavior works, see How syncing works.