Since last week, when I was assigned to work on Shopify, I’ve felt that something was off. Shouldn’t this be the operations team’s job? I’m just a humble developer and have never had any knowledge of cross-border e-commerce or anything like that.

But I’m still in my probationary period, so I don’t dare refuse these strange work assignments. I could only grit my teeth and take them on. A week has passed, and after constantly exploring and tinkering, I’ve finally made some progress.

The most time-consuming task, importing products, was completed a couple of days ago. I used the Amazon product-import plugin recommended by my boss. Although it isn’t particularly easy to use either, it often triggers restrictions and causes the import to fail, requiring a refresh before trying again.

After the product import is complete, the products still need to be categorized. I really couldn’t handle this step because I’m still not very familiar with the SKUs in this product line, so I had to ask the operations person to help with it at the same time.

However, he seemed to never have any time for it. To avoid holding up my progress, I had no choice but to use AI to categorize the products based on their titles and keywords. I managed to put together some product categories, though they weren’t entirely accurate.

When my boss came over to inspect the results, he found Shopify’s default theme too plain and felt that it needed to be redesigned. I quickly explained to him that Shopify has its own independent templating language, which isn’t part of my tech stack, and that redeveloping it would require a learning curve.

In the end, my boss was persuaded by my eloquence, so he started browsing the ready-made themes in the theme store. I have to say, Shopify is really expensive—the paid themes generally cost several hundred dollars.

My boss was quite lavish too. He took a liking to a $380 theme and clicked the payment button immediately. There was no stopping him. If I had known he was this generous, I wouldn’t have imported the products one by one over the past couple of days; I would have gone straight for the paid version with bulk importing.

By the way, when can I ask my boss to get me a Copilot Pro+ subscription? That way I wouldn’t have to keep searching everywhere for unconventional ways to write code. If that doesn’t work, he could just give me the money as a performance bonus.

Buying the theme is only the first step. Next, we still need to configure our products to fit the theme, as well as fine-tune the theme’s styles and layout. Through this process, I’m also becoming increasingly familiar with using Shopify’s admin panel. Maybe if I switch careers in the future, I could even become a cross-border e-commerce operator.