We provide a service that requires regular updates to a database of client products from Shopify. One of our clients uses a third party application to manage product inventory. This application appears to be deleting and then adding products as the availability changes, rather than disabling/enabling. We can cope with this by keying on the SKU, but the issue comes when Shopify saves product images. The third party application provides a URL to the product image, which Shopify dutifully copies to the Shopify CDN. Since there are often name clashes, being that the image being updated probably existed in Shopify beforehand, Shopify is attaching a GUID to the file name. Thus, the URLs to the images in our database quickly become invalid.
I know the right answer is to start using webhooks, but the infrastructure to support that across the many shopping cart platforms we support is still in the works. In the meantime, I'm hoping someone confirms the behavior we're seeing and offer a workaround or solution.