· Andrei M. · Automation · 5 min read
Product Export Rules: Block Loss-Making, Out-of-Stock and Duplicate Supplier Products Before They Go Live
Stop publishing loss-making or out-of-stock products. Here is how minimum margin, minimum stock and cheapest-supplier rules decide what leaves your catalog, how they combine, and where they fall short.
AEO answer: Export rules decide which products leave your catalog for a store or marketplace. The common ones are a minimum margin (selling price against cost price), a minimum stock level, and “cheapest supplier only” when several suppliers sell the same product. A product is listed only if it passes every rule. Evaluate the rules on every sync, not once, because cost and stock change daily.
Most catalogs hold more than you should sell. Some products lose money after fees, some are out of stock, and some come from three suppliers at three prices. Publishing everything creates cancelled orders and thin margins. This guide covers three rules that fix that, how MicroPIM applies them, and where they stop.
Last verified: October 2026, against MicroPIM’s Integration Sync Rules and the cited platform documentation.
Why publish only part of your catalog?
A supplier feed is a list of what the supplier can sell, not what you should. Three problems repeat:
- Unprofitable items. After a price change or a fee increase, a product can sell below what it costs you.
- Unavailable items. Marketplaces expect accurate availability. Google Merchant Center, for example, uses the availability attribute to tell shoppers whether an item can be bought.
- Duplicate offers. The same barcode arrives from several suppliers, and you want one listing at the best cost.
How does a minimum margin rule work?
You enter a percentage. A product passes if its margin is at or above it.
MicroPIM computes margin from two fields on the product:
margin % = (price − cost price) ÷ cost price × 100
That is markup on cost. If you think in margin on selling price, convert: a 20% margin on price needs a 25% markup on cost.
Three details matter:
- Missing data fails the rule. No cost price, no price, or a zero cost price means the margin cannot be calculated, so the product is held back.
- Tax is not adjusted. The rule uses the stored price and cost as they are. If your price includes tax and your cost does not, the margin looks better than it is.
- Fees are not included. Marketplace commission, shipping and returns only count if you fold them into the cost price.
Keep cost prices accurate. A margin rule is only as good as the cost behind it. Shopify can store a unit cost per item too (see the InventoryItem object), but the rule reads the cost in your catalog.
How do stock and cheapest-supplier rules work?
| Rule | What it checks | Setting |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum margin | (price − cost) ÷ cost, as a percentage | Minimum percentage |
| Minimum stock | Product stock is at or above a number | Minimum quantity |
| Cheapest vendor | Among products sharing an EAN, only the lowest cost passes | None |
Minimum stock. Set a quantity, for example 1 or 5. Products below it are held back. A product with no stock value at all also fails.
Cheapest vendor. Products are matched by EAN across your suppliers, and only the one with the lowest cost price passes. Products without an EAN always pass, because there is nothing to match them on. This is why barcode quality matters; see merging supplier files by key.
You manage all of this in the admin under Integration Sync Rules. Create a rule, pick its type, enter the threshold and switch it on or off whenever you need.
How do you combine rules without hiding good products?
A product must pass all active rules. Rules narrow the list; they never add products back.
Start with one rule and look at what disappears before adding another. Then check the order:
- Bulk pushes run rules in priority order. Put minimum stock before cheapest vendor, so the cheapest supplier is chosen among products you can actually ship.
- Single product updates judge cheapest vendor against every copy in your catalog, in stock or not.
The two paths can disagree. Test with a product that has two suppliers, one cheaper but out of stock.
For recurring jobs, pair rules with automation recipes. Rules filter at export; the blocklist approach filters at import. They solve different problems.
What we got wrong, and current limits
We first thought of rules as a one-time filter. That was wrong. Cost and stock move every day, so the rules run on each push and each product update, not when you create them.
Current limits:
- Rules gate pushes; they do not clean up. A product that stops passing is skipped. The live listing is not unpublished and does not receive further updates, so its channel stock can go stale.
- One rule set per organization. There are no per-store rules.
- Cheapest vendor ignores stock on single product updates, so a cheap supplier out of stock can hide a dearer one that has units.
- Supplier filtering is not set in the rule form. It is configured per automation.
- Downloaded export files are not filtered. Rules apply to pushes to integrations only.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good minimum margin to list a product? It depends on fees, shipping and returns. Add your per-order costs first, then set a threshold that still leaves profit. Check whether your tool uses margin or markup.
Can I use different rules per store? Not in MicroPIM today. Rules apply to all connected integrations in your organization.
What happens when stock drops below the minimum? The product is skipped on later pushes. The listing already live stays as it was, so set it to out of stock or unpublish it on the channel. Shopify’s inventory quantities mutation is the API route for stock changes.
How is margin calculated? (Price − cost price) ÷ cost price × 100, which is markup on cost.
MicroPIM is our product. The rules here (margin, stock, cheapest supplier, all must pass) work in any tool or spreadsheet; this post describes how MicroPIM handles them.
Keep supplier data flowing with supplier import automation, and see multi-channel inventory management for stock across channels. To set up your first rules with us, book a demo.
