The Table editor fills in like a spreadsheet, which is exactly why merchants paste whole product lists into it: a fitment chart, a compatibility table, a box of barcodes from a supplier sheet. Most rows match a product in your store right away. The odd one doesn't — a typo in the sheet, an old barcode, a product that isn't in Shopify yet — and until now that meant stopping, opening the product in a second tab, and typing the right value back into the cell by hand.
Scan to resolve skips that detour. When a cell holds a barcode the table can't match, it shows a QR code right next to the row. Scan it with your phone, hold the camera over the barcode on the actual product or box, and resolve it from there — no typing the code by hand on a tiny label, and no digging through products to find the one it belongs to.
Two ways to resolve it
- Assign it to a product. Scan the real barcode, and your phone shows the products it could be — pick the right one and the cell links to it. Useful when the sheet's code is close but not exact, or the product goes by a different barcode in Shopify than on the supplier's packaging.
- Start the product. Scanning a barcode that matches nothing in your store yet flags that row to build the product for, so you can keep moving through the rest of the table instead of stopping to create it right away.
Why your phone and not the keyboard
A barcode is built to be read by a scanner, not typed. On a desktop table with no barcode gun plugged in, the only option was copying digits off a label into a cell — slow, and one mistyped digit away from pointing at the wrong product. Your phone's camera is a scanner you already have in your pocket, and the QR code is just the handoff: it opens that one cell's resolve screen on your phone, nothing else.
Nothing is written to your store until you resolve the cell. The QR code only opens a picker on your phone — it doesn't skip the review you'd normally get before a change is saved.
Where to find it
It shows up automatically: paste or type a barcode into any table cell, and if it doesn't match a product, the "not found" prompt appears with the two options above. Scan to resolve is part of the Table editor on every plan.
Stop retyping barcodes by hand.
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