Hi,
What exactly is the difference in the functionality behind the "Add to group" and "Publish to Ecom" options?
I noticed an issue with the former has an "issue" not showing the groups tree (http://doc.dynamicweb.com/forum/feature-requests/feature-requests/pim-add-to-group), but after fiddling around that seems to be due to the fact that my only shop was not configured as a warehouse ("Use as PIM Product Warehouse" in the Shop settings), I noticed that seems to be the critera for shops showing up there. That however results in the Shop disappearing from Ecommerce. This might perhaps better be reflected in the UI (radio/toggle and labels indicating that it's xor).
So I'm concluding that the former offers only Warehouses, and the latter only [non-warehouse] Shops - and adding a warehouse confirms that.
However, we've noticed that when working with products in the PIM, there seems to be an issue with products sometimes being swapped to active although we have not touched the active flag on the products in questions. We suspected that it might be due to the fact that we're using the "Publish to Ecom" option, but that still doesn't seem to set products to active - at least not always.
So the big question - is there any difference between the two, apart from showing Warehouses vs. Shops?
-Tolli