Power Tools runs the store updates on a regular basis, this is usually done every hour or so. You might have noticed the 'Store update' job in the queue under the Jobs tab in your Power Tools admin:

To make sure your Shopify admin and Power Tools admin are in sync, the app runs these store updates to align the data from both platforms - this is essential for all of the features of our app to work correctly. You should not worry about adding new products and collections - the app will check for updates in your Shopify admin and reflect the changes in the Power Tools admin respectively for the Filter Menu and other apps to work correctly.

Filter Menu synchronises the tags with the source collections to make sure only the relevant products are showing upon filtering.

The process of syncing tags involves adding a tag that matches the collection handle to each item in that collection, if any products in your store have that same tag but are not in the collection, the tag will be removed. This is a requirement for the filter menu to function properly.

In case you have set up the filters based on prefixes - the app checks for new tags with the given prefix and populates the associated filter groups with any new options.

If a change in the source collection for a filter is detected (if it's been hidden or if collection rules require an update for the app to work correctly) - you'll see a corresponding message in your Filter Menu admin next to the associated filter option.

Variant Tagger checks for the variants' availability and updates the tags on your products based on variant options that are in stock. For variants that are no longer in stock - tags will be removed from the products. This also allows the Filter Menu to be updated based on the variant tags, in case you have added any new variant options, the app will automatically populate the associated filter group with new filter options.

Easy Collections checks for newly added Vendors and Product Types and creates associated collections. Additionally, it updates the associated Vendor and Product Type filter groups by automatically populating the new filter options.

Bulk Edit Tags - in case you have set up the 'Product tag jobs', the app updates the tags to match the chosen conditions.

Trending Products automatically updates the products' order in the selected collections based on product views and your selected settings (new products position, days of historical data used, featured products, etc.)

Hide Sold Out checks the products' inventory and hides/unhides your products, moves them to the end of your collections, publishes non-empty collections, etc.

Pricing Policy updates the prices according to the discount rules set up in the Pricing Policy admin.

Sort Orders updates the products' order within your collections based on your current set up. For example, if you have set your collections to the Random sort order, your products will be randomised every hour or so.

If you notice certain tags to be missing or collections sort order not being updated, you might just need to wait for the app to complete the next store update!

The store updates are run by the app once every hour by default (for small and medium stores). For larger stores the update frequency is automatically adjusted according to the number of products, the number of jobs to be run, and the time it took for the last update to complete. There is no setting to adjust the time between updates.

Click on "Jobs" in the app sidebar, and you'll see a dropdown menu for pausing the store updates, here you can select the time you'd like to pause updates for.

In your Power Tools admin go to the dashboard page by selecting "Dashboard" in the sidebar, or "Jobs" section – and click the "Run Store Update" button. Here you will also see when the last update was run, the status, and the next scheduled run time.

The time it takes to complete a store update will depend on the number of products in your store, and the features you have enabled. Shopify applies a rate-limit to their API, so our app is able to process around 2 items per second.

If the app does not detect any changes in your store then the time between updates might be longer, which is why sometimes you might see 2, 3, or 4 hours between updates sometimes.

The app 'watches' your store for any changes to product data, a store update will be run within the next hour after a change is detected. However, that will not happen if an update has already run within the last hour. As the minimum time between updates must be an hour.

Long updates and long times between updates are due to having a large number of items, those items requiring a large number of operations on them. Shopify's rate-limiting should also be taken into account, as this affects the speed at which these updates can occur.

In order to speed up the processing and time between processing in the future you can adjust any of these variables:

1. Disable features - some features require very heavy processing, including the moving of items within a collection, such as the "Sold out products last" feature, or randomising a collection.

2. Trim your products - delete products that are no longer in use. Do not hide them, as they will still be processed.

3. Do not overwrite your products from a 3rd party system - each time this happens, the app will have to add back any properties, such as tags or meta fields, to each of the products, collections, or other Shopify objects. This is very time consuming and usually should only happen the first time you run Power Tools or make bulk changes.