Guide
How to do the things OneFold does, written around what you are trying to get done.
Getting started
What does OneFold actually do?
OneFold turns product information into a finished listing: title, description, specifications, keywords, alt text and a suggested price range, and then checks that listing before it reaches your store.
The checking is the part worth paying for. Anything can write product copy. OneFold scores whether search engines and AI assistants can actually find it, measures how much of it is supplier text every competitor also published, and validates it against marketplace rules and EU product-safety law: before you publish, not after a rejection.
Nothing is ever published live. Listings arrive in your store as drafts for you to approve.
I have a store already: is this for me?
Yes, and you should not start by uploading a photo.
Connect Shopify or WooCommerce and OneFold pulls your existing products in, scores each one and shows you which are worth fixing first. Nothing in your store changes until you approve it.
If instead you are starting from a supplier photo with no listing yet, the Studio is your path: one photo in, a complete listing out.
How do I make my first listing?
Open the Studio and drop in one photo: straight from your phone is fine, including HEIC, up to 20MB. Larger photos are resized in your browser before they upload.
OneFold reads the product from the image, writes every field, and then shows you three things: the Visibility score, the Originality score, and anything that would block publishing.
It will also list the handful of facts a photo cannot establish: weight, what is in the box, warranty. Those stay blank until you fill them in. OneFold does not guess them.
How do I connect my store?
WooCommerce: type your shop's web address and press Connect with WordPress. You go to your own WordPress, WooCommerce asks whether to let OneFold read and edit your products, you press Approve, and you come back connected. Nothing to copy. If your site blocks that screen, the page also lets you paste a REST API key instead.
Shopify: press Add OneFold to Shopify on the Integrations page. Shopify asks you to approve OneFold, opens it inside your Shopify admin, and one press of Finish connecting ties the shop to your account. Your plan is then billed through Shopify, and you change it from your Shopify admin. Stock levels are not sent by OneFold; set them in Shopify.
Until the OneFold app is listed, the Integrations page says so. Since 1 January 2026 Shopify no longer lets stores create the custom app the old method needed; if you made one before then, its Admin API access token (starting shpat_) still works — paste it under “I already have a custom app token”.
If a connection fails, OneFold tells you which of those went wrong rather than showing you the raw error.
If your products live in a spreadsheet
What can I upload?
A .csv, an .xlsx, or a PDF price list, with column names in the first row and one product per row after that. A supplier spreadsheet, an export from your ERP, the PDF catalogue your supplier emails you. Up to 100,000 rows and 20MB per file.
PDFs have to contain real text. If the pages are scans or photographs OneFold tells you so rather than guessing at your prices from a picture. Catalogues that repeat the column headings on every page, or put a section title above each group of products, are handled: those rows are recognised and left out, and anything skipped is listed with the row number you will find in your own file.
It does not matter what your columns are called or what order they are in. OneFold recognises the usual spellings in several languages (sku, Item No., Artikelnummer) and shows you what it guessed so you can correct it before anything is created.
What is the mapping screen for?
It asks which of your columns is the product name, which is the price, which is the barcode, and so on. Guesses are filled in already; your own data is shown underneath each one so you are checking against the file rather than your memory of it.
Columns OneFold does not recognise are not thrown away. They are kept with the product under “extra detail”, exactly as they were written. A warehouse bin number or a customs code means nothing to us and a great deal to you.
Does it write descriptions for me?
No, and that is deliberate. Importing MOVES what is already in your file. If a row has no description, the listing has no description, and the score will tell you so.
Writing the missing parts is a separate, explicit step you press afterwards, per product or in bulk. That way you always know which words are yours, which came from your supplier, and which OneFold wrote.
Why did everything I imported score so low?
Because a supplier file usually contains a name, a code and a price, and almost nothing a search engine or a buyer is looking for. A score of 15 or 22 on a freshly imported row is not a fault. It is an accurate measurement of raw supplier data.
That gap is the work. Fix the blocking issues first, then let OneFold write the missing fields, and watch the same rows climb.
What if I upload the same file twice?
Nothing is duplicated. OneFold skips any row whose SKU you already have and tells you which ones, so re-uploading a corrected price list does not leave you with two of everything.
If you genuinely want a second copy there is a checkbox on the mapping screen to allow it.
Does importing use up my plan?
It uses your PRODUCTS allowance, not your LISTINGS allowance. Importing calls no AI — it moves your own values into fields — so none of your monthly AI listings are spent. Scoring the imported rows is free too.
But every imported row becomes a product your account holds, and each plan holds a set number: 100 on Free, 1,000 on Starter, 10,000 on Business, 50,000 on Catalogue. A file with more rows than the room you have left is refused before anything is created, and the message says how many products it would have added and how many you have room for. Half a catalogue, cut off at an arbitrary row, would be worse than none.
This answer used to say simply "No", which was true of the AI allowance and misleading about the product count.
If you already have a catalogue
How do I get my products into OneFold?
Connect the store, then press Sync. OneFold pulls in your products : titles, descriptions, images and identifiers, and leaves them exactly as they are in your store.
The sync is one-way. OneFold reads your catalogue; it does not write anything back until you ask it to, and it never touches stock levels, prices, variants or SKUs.
I have hundreds of products. Which do I fix first?
Sort by what is actually costing you something. A product that cannot be published because it is missing EU safety details is a legal exposure. A product whose copy is identical to every other seller's is invisible to search. A product with a weak title is merely underperforming.
The products list shows blocking issues as a badge, so the ones carrying real risk are visible without opening each one.
What will OneFold change in my store?
On a product that is already in your store, only the fields you approve: title, description, SEO fields, keywords, alt text and images.
On those products it does not modify inventory, price, SKU, variants, categories or metafields it did not create.
A product OneFold publishes for the first time is different, because it has to arrive complete: it carries the price, SKU, barcode and any options and SKUs you entered here. It is written as a draft either way, and the publishing log records exactly what went where.
If you are starting from a supplier photo
Why does my supplier's description score badly?
Because ten thousand other shops published the same paragraph. Search engines pick one of those pages to rank, and it is rarely the newest shop.
The Originality score measures how much of your copy you share with competitors: stock supplier phrases, marketing filler, and the tells of unedited AI writing, and names the sentences that cost you the most.
Can OneFold rewrite it for me?
Yes. "Rewrite this in your own words" rebuilds the description using only facts your listing already contains.
It will not invent a weight, a material or a warranty to sound more specific. If it cannot improve the copy without inventing something, it says so and asks you for the missing detail instead.
Can I do many products at once?
Yes, on every plan including Free. Drop in a set of photos, add a short hint per photo if a product needs it, and OneFold generates them as a batch.
Each item is reviewed individually before anything publishes, and a failure on one photo does not stop the rest.
Understanding the scores
What is the Visibility score?
Three checks, each out of 100. Search engines: whether Google can index and rank the listing. Answer engines: whether a voice assistant or featured snippet will read it out. AI assistants: whether ChatGPT will cite your product when someone asks for a recommendation.
It is arithmetic, not an AI opinion. The same listing always scores the same, and every check tells you exactly what it wants.
What is the Originality score?
How much of your copy is yours rather than text shared with every other seller of the same product. Under 50 means search engines are likely to treat your page as a duplicate.
What is keyword coverage?
Whether your keywords are still in the places that carry weight: the title, the meta description and the opening lines: not merely present somewhere on the page.
Why is there no keyword ranking?
Because Amazon and Etsy do not publish rank in their APIs, and scraping it breaks their terms and risks your account.
Anyone showing you a rank number for those channels is guessing. OneFold reports what can be measured honestly.
Barcodes, sizes and structured data
How does the barcode check work?
Type a barcode (EAN, UPC or GTIN) into the listing, or give each size its own in Options & SKUs, or include a barcode column in an imported file. OneFold recognises 8, 12, 13 and 14-digit codes.
The last digit of every barcode is calculated from the others, so a single mistyped digit can be caught. OneFold redoes that sum. A correct barcode is labelled with its type, such as EAN-13. A wrong one gets a plain warning naming the digit it should end in.
When you publish, a correct barcode goes to your store with the product. A wrong one is held back, because a wrong barcode is worse than none: Google matches it to another company's product and your offer is shown in the wrong place.
Handmade, vintage and second-hand products usually have no barcode, and their score is not marked down for the lack of one.
My product comes in several sizes or colours. What do I do?
Open the listing and use Options & SKUs. Name what it varies by (Size, Colour, up to three), list the values separated by commas, and press Build the list. Every combination becomes a row with its own price, compare-at price, SKU, barcode and stock. Delete any row you do not stock.
Adding a size later keeps everything you have already typed: prices stay with the size they belong to, even if the new size goes in the middle of the list.
A row with no price of its own is sold at the product price. Blank stock means you do not track it; 0 means sold out.
Importing a supplier file that lists one product once per size? On the mapping screen, choose to group rows that share a product title or SKU, and tick which columns say what differs. Grouping is always off unless you turn it on, because merging two different products by mistake is harder to spot than a duplicate.
Sizes publish to Shopify and WooCommerce as real options a buyer chooses between.
What is the machine-readable version on my listing?
Search engines and AI assistants look for a block of structured data (schema.org) that states the brand, price, barcode and answers as facts. OneFold builds it from your listing and shows it on the listing page with a copy button.
It never includes a star rating or reviews, because OneFold has none and inventing them is fraud that lands on your shop. It leaves out the price if no currency is set, rather than guessing one.
It is also stored on the product when you publish, but storing is not showing: nothing reads it until your theme prints it on the page. Check your page source first — most themes already publish a Product block, and two blocks describing one product is worse than none.
On WooCommerce, the free OneFold Structured Data plugin prints it for you on every product OneFold publishes. Download it from the machine-readable panel on any listing and upload it under Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin. By default it adds only the FAQ, so it never duplicates the product block WooCommerce already prints; a setting lets it replace that block instead.
What does "You already sell" mean under a suggestion?
OneFold suggests products to cross-sell, upsell and bundle. Where a suggestion matches a product already in your account, it tells you which one, so you can link your own products together. Links between your own products help shoppers and search engines understand your range.
It only matches when it is sure. One shared word is not enough, and if two of your products fit equally well it picks neither, because a wrong link sends a shopper to the wrong product.
OneFold does not build or buy links from other websites. Doing that is against Google's rules and the penalty falls on your shop.
Checks and publishing
What is the pre-publish check?
Your listing measured against the rules of the marketplaces you sell on. Amazon, Etsy, eBay and Shopify: plus EU product-safety requirements.
Anything that would be rejected is shown before you publish, with a one-click fix for everything a machine can repair on its own.
The marketplace checks are useful even where OneFold cannot publish for you: most sellers list on Amazon and Etsy by hand, and finding out why you were rejected afterwards is the expensive part.
What is GPSR and does it apply to me?
The EU General Product Safety Regulation. If you sell physical products to buyers in the EU, every listing must name a responsible person in the EU, carry manufacturer details and show any safety warnings.
These are the same on every listing you make, so OneFold asks once in Settings and applies them everywhere.
Why can't I publish this product?
Prescription medicines, weapons and explicit counterfeits are blocked outright. Publishing them is a criminal offence in most countries and ends your merchant account, so there is no override.
Regulated-but-legal categories. CBD, nicotine, alcohol, car seats: ask you to confirm you hold the necessary approvals, then publish normally.
If a check is wrong about your product, contact support and we will look at it.
Which stores can OneFold publish to?
Shopify and WooCommerce, as drafts.
Etsy, eBay and Amazon cannot be connected. OneFold can check a listing against their rules, but there is no way to send anything to them.
Plans and usage
What counts against my plan?
Every plan has two different numbers, and they measure different things.
PRODUCTS is how many items your account can hold at once: everything you import from a file, pull in from your store, or create. Holding a product costs nothing, so scoring it, checking it against marketplace and EU rules, and editing it by hand are free and unlimited within that number.
LISTINGS is how many brand-new listings the AI writes for you each month from a photo. That is the part that costs money to run, so it is the part that is metered. On the Free plan you can hold up to 100 products and have the AI write 3 new ones a month. Importing a file uses products, never listings: it calls no AI.
Beyond that, each account has a monthly AI budget for fixes, rewrites and image generation, sized as a multiple of your listing allowance.
Generated images are counted per image, not per click: asking for four variations uses four.
Monitoring costs nothing against the AI budget: it is arithmetic plus one call to your store.
What monitoring do I get?
Free does not include monitoring. Paid plans monitor a set number of products at a cadence set by the plan, and you can always choose a slower cadence than your plan allows.
When something goes wrong
My store will not connect
For Shopify, the most common cause is an expired or mistyped Admin API token. They are shown only once, when the app is created. The second most common is a missing scope: the app needs read_products and write_products.
For WooCommerce, use your site's root address rather than a page or the wp-admin URL, and check the API key has Read/Write permission. Some security plugins block /wp-json/ entirely.
Generation failed or the photo was rejected
OneFold refuses photos that are not of a sellable product: a screenshot, a person, a diagram: rather than inventing a listing for something it cannot see.
If generation fails for another reason, nothing is charged against your allowance and it is safe to try again.
I did not get an email
Check spam first. If a password-reset email never arrives and the page told you it could not send one, that is a problem on our side : contact support from the address on your account.
Something missing?
If you looked for something here and did not find it, that is useful to know, tell us through the contact page and we will add it.