The problems
- SEO fields (title, meta description, alt text) are missing on a long tail of products no one has time to review.
- Compare-at prices drift below the real price, creating ghost sales and feed disapprovals.
- Products get published without images, variants or descriptions during rushed launches.
- There is no single view of catalog health — issues are only spotted one product at a time.
Approaches
Spreadsheet-based audits
Export the full product CSV, filter for empty fields in Excel or Sheets, and share the list. Works once but is painful to repeat and never covers image or pricing checks.
Read-only audit apps
Scan the catalog through the Shopify API and report on missing SEO fields, image issues, pricing anomalies and structural problems. No writes, so there is no risk to production data.
Manual spot checks
Useful for bestsellers but hopeless at catalog scale. A store with 2,000 SKUs cannot be spot-checked into good shape.
Best practices
- Run a full audit before every major campaign or catalog import.
- Prioritise fixes by revenue — bestsellers first, long tail later.
- Track a health score over time so regressions are visible.
- Keep audits read-only; use a separate tool (like ABAR Bulk Edit) for the fixes.
- Re-scan after every bulk edit to confirm the fix actually landed.
Checklist
- 1Scan every product for missing SEO title and meta description
- 2Check every image for missing alt text
- 3Flag variants with $0 price or compare-at below price
- 4List products without images, variants or descriptions
- 5Identify orphaned products (not in any collection)
- 6Export the report and prioritise by revenue impact
- 7Re-audit after fixes to confirm the health score improved
FAQ
A proper audit tool is read-only — it inspects data through the Shopify API and reports issues. ABAR Catalog Guard never writes to your store.