Operating material tags

Material tags are Shopify product tags that Assemblified maintains for you: a tag you mark as a default BOM tag goes on every finished good Assemblified knows about, and one you mark as a default raw-material tag goes on every raw material. A connected assistant can read the catalogue, and with write access change it and put the tags to work.

What it takes

Reading needs nothing beyond a connection. Changing a tag needs write access: either an API key created with read & write scope or a web-chat connection granted read & write when it was linked. See API keys and Connect claude.ai or ChatGPT.

Reading the catalogue

The assistant can list every tag, with its two default flags and when it was last changed. The flags are the part that matters:

Default BOM tag — Assemblified puts it on every finished good it knows about.
Default raw-material tag — Assemblified puts it on every raw material.
Neither — a manual label. It is stored, and nothing applies it for you.

Adding and correcting a tag

A tag is the literal Shopify tag, as written, and it has to be unique. An assistant that tries to add one you already have is told so rather than creating a near-duplicate.

Two things are worth knowing, because neither is obvious:

Creating a tag puts it on nothing. A default tag is applied from then on, as Assemblified touches each product. The products that already exist are dealt with separately, below.
Renaming a tag does not rename it on Shopify. The products that carry the old tag keep it; Assemblified starts maintaining the new one. If you want the old one gone, say so — the assistant can delete it with its cleanup, which is the tidy way round.

Applying a tag to everything that matches

“Apply now” is how the products that already exist get a default tag without waiting. The assistant can ask for it, and there are two rules:

It only works for a tag with one of the default flags. A manual tag has no matching set to apply to, so the request is refused with that reason.
The answer is a job, not a result. Nothing is on Shopify the moment the assistant replies; the work is queued and runs in the background. Check the products, or the tag jobs on the Tags settings page, if you want to see it land.

“Add a tag called Made in house, make it the default for finished goods, and put it on the ones we already have.”

Deleting a tag, and the products it is on

Deleting a tag from the catalogue does not strip it off your products by default: the row goes and Assemblified simply stops maintaining it, leaving every product exactly as it is. That is often what you want if the tag is doing a job in your storefront.

If you want it gone from the products too, the assistant can ask for the cleanup with the delete. Then the order matters and is deliberate: the cleanup is queued first, and the tag is only removed from the catalogue once it is. The cleanup is available for a default tag only — that flag is what defines the set of products to sweep.

When a job cannot be queued

Both “apply now” and the delete cleanup report whether the job actually reached the queue, and the assistant should tell you which. A job that was recorded but not queued comes with the reason, and the commonest one is the dullest: there was nothing to tag. Either way, nothing is on Shopify until a queued job runs.