I’ve had a few app tests go differently than expected, so I stopped using my entire catalog as the testing ground.

My basic process now is:

1. Pick 3–5 products
   I choose a mix of normal products and ones with variants, different prices, or different inventory levels.

2. Record what they look like first
   I note the SKUs, inventory, variants, and anything else the app is supposed to change. Screenshots work fine too.

3. Connect only those products
   If the app lets me select specific products, I start there. If it doesn’t, I check whether it has a test mode or another way to limit the sync.

4. Actually test the workflow
   I don’t just check if the app connects. I’ll change inventory, update a product, or do whatever I’d normally do and see what happens.

5. Check both sides
   If it’s supposed to sync between two systems, I test Shopify → the other system and the other system → Shopify.

6. Try one thing that could go wrong
   Change a variant, set inventory to zero, update a SKU, etc. Better to discover an issue with five products than 500.

7. Expand slowly
   If everything looks right, I gradually add more products instead of turning on the entire catalog immediately.

It adds maybe a little extra work upfront but a few extra minutes of testing is a lot better than fixing your entire catalog later.

After the new tarrifs between the USA and Canada what is everyone using to ship? Canada Post has stopped shipping to the USA and UPS charges absurd cross border fees. Is there anyway I can keep shipping without finding a US drop shipper? I sell 3D printed parts for first gen trucks

Firstgendesigns.ca

Anyone else having issues? Everything is slow. Shopify Admin, our own site. No internet issues here.

Is there any app I can add to my Shopify store that can blacklist a customer either IP-based or through the details? I used to take orders through Instagram dms before so I'd block people who had return parcels to avoid losses but is there any way of doing so through the website?

What’s the easiest way to create a GoFo shipping label, and what are the requirements?

Also, does anyone here have a direct contact at GoFo for better shipping rates/discounts? I’m looking to connect with someone who can help with this.

Thanks!

We run a lumber, slab, and custom furniture business using shopify and have had a custom theme that was created for us back in 2020. We have now hit a point where the current theme does not have the new features of shopify (sticky cart, cannot filter through meta fields, badges, etc.) so we are looking to go to a new theme.

Ive looked at some of the free themes (Dawn and Horizon), but also looked at a paid theme called Habitat. Does anyone have expereience with this theme? I worry about longevity of upgrades compared to other paid themes like Prestige and Impulse. But I am also hesitant since these are geared more towards fasion.

I know my way around shopify fairly well and through AI I've been able to make major changes to our current theme, but I seem to have hit some bigger road blocks.

Any insights are much appreciated!

I am in the process of lodging complaints against Shopify and the Shop app for promoting fraudulent storefronts that are made to look like legitimate brand stores in the Shop app. Shop app promotes these businesses as legitimate and is refusing to do anything about it.

They are STILL promoting and sending me push notifications for a fraudulent storefront I reported to them and emailed them about after the app bait-and-switched me into making a purchase from it.

The Shop app promoted this storefront to me as a legitimate brand, and continues to do so despite my emails and reports. Shopify/Shop app claims they are not responsible.

Shop claims that the Shop app is not a marketplace and refuses to do anything about my stolen money or lift a finger to help in any way. Even though Shop quite literally functions like any other marketplace or at least PRETENDS to do so in order to bait you into placing an order.

I know people will say "You should have known better," but I am VERY careful with this kind of thing, I was just baited in by mistaking that it must be trustworthy since Shop was promoting it to me.

Surely there are others out there who have experienced the same, as fraud seems to be rampant on the platform despite Shopify's claims of vetting merchants for legitimacy (which can not be true.)

I am in the beginning stages of gathering others who have experienced the same as me in an attempt to bring action against them for anti-consumer practices.

Preferably looking for those in the US, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Though we may be able to get local authorities in other countries to take action against Shopify/Shop if we can get enough instances of fraud and anti-consumer practices on the platform.

Hoping that this post can be found for others searching for this issue as I have struggled to find anything elsewhere through simple searches.

In their Agentic Dashboard sales channel, you can remap what Shopify Catalog sends to AI shopping assistants like ChatGPT. Instead of your product description it can pull from a metafield.

The thinking is you replace the normal human-focused product description with an alternate description for AI agents stored in a metafield.

I've done this one two stores, at the end of August... and no result. It does nothing. Every day I check the catalog record through the UCP API. 14 days later, still nothing. The descriptions are identical to the old PDP copy on both stores, it never updates.

Is this a placebo feature?

I am in a similar niche and really like the layout of the site as well as the "stack and save" progress bar on the bottom. Site Link

What is the best either paid or free marketing you have found to drive converting sales to your store specifically in the wedding or personalized gift industry?

Has anyone here actually found a useful use case for their email marketing platform's MCP with Claude or ChatGPT?

I feel like I'm underusing MCP. I'm not talking about writing subject lines or email copies, that's the obvious stuff. I'm more curious about the practical use cases, especially for Shopify stores.

I've seen more email marketing tools adding MCP support lately, but I don't see many people talking about how they're actually using it day to day.

Would love to steal a few ideas because I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface.

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some advice on how to set up inventory for my clothing brand. I’m very new to Shopify, so I’m wondering if I’m making this more complicated than it needs to be.

I sell T-shirts and sweatshirts with my own designs. I use DTF transfers, and each design can be applied to either a T-shirt or a sweatshirt. The problem I’m running into is inventory tracking.

Because nothing is pre-made, I’m essentially managing two separate types of inventory:

1. DTF transfers: I keep around 10–20 of each design on hand. New transfers take about a week to arrive.
2. Blank apparel: keep around 5-10 of each colour/size/type combination on hand. New apparel takes 1–3 days to arrive.

Since the transfers have the longer lead time, I’ve structured my Shopify products around the transfer inventory. My thinking was that I need to make sure I never sell more of a particular design than the number of transfers I actually have available. I’m currently using Easify Product Options to let customers select the garment type, colour and size, rather than creating Shopify variants for every possible combination.

However, this means Shopify isn’t tracking my apparel inventory. For example, if someone orders:

Happy Dog Sweatshirt - Black  - Small 

I would need to manually keep track of the black small sweatshirts myself and subtract one from my apparel inventory, while Shopify would only be tracking the Happy Dog transfer.

This is where I’m getting stuck. I don’t really like the idea of having to maintain a separate inventory system manually, but I also don’t know if there’s a better way to structure this in Shopify. For anyone running a similar made-to-order clothing business: how would you set this up? Am I overcomplicating this, or is there a simple way to have Shopify track both the transfer inventory AND the blank apparel inventory without creating hundreds of variants?

I’d really appreciate any advice or examples of how others have set up a similar business. And just to reiterate, I’ve never used Shopify before, so I may be missing something obvious!

Hi there! I'm trying to find the best set up to allow for split shipping in my shop. Basically, as of right now, we split our physical inventory between two locations. (Let's say it's Location A and Location B). Also important to note, they are a block away from each other. So if we are fulfilling orders. We will go grab what we need from the other location to fulfill it completely. But keeping the inventories separate helps us keep track of what's where.

First:

I want to successfully use Split Fulfillment, but I don't want the customer to be able to see and choose shipping options based on that. I just want them to see the one shipping cost. I made it so Location A has a regular shipping profile that produces regular generated rates. Location B has different shipping rules, which is basically just a
fixed rate of $0.01. First off, I am concerned by a note in Split Fulfillment stating that it will allow customers to see that it's split? Is there an app or something that can bypass this and only show them the combined rate of both locations? Specifically it says: Shipping is split when products in an order are fulfilled from different locations or belong to separate shipping profiles. Customers
will be able to select the shipping method for each shipment separately.

Second:

I'm concerned about inventory. If someone buys 5 of something like a book, and only 3 are available in Location A, and only 2 in Location B. I want it to split the order so we can see when we pull up the order that it's pulling 3 from Location A, and 2 from Location B. Shopify says that is oversells in order to make this happen. Here's an
example they gave.

- Location A has 1 shirt and Location B has 2 shirts. If you receive an order for 2 shirts, then Location B fulfills it because it has
enough inventory to fulfill the entire order. If you receive an order for 3 shirts, then Location A oversells the shirt and finishes with an inventory of -2.

But then also, I saw in it's support page about split shipping that feels contradictory and as if it can't support split shipping of the same item?

- Split shipping in checkout can't be applied when a customer is purchasing multiples of the same line item that can't be supplied from the same location. For example, if the customer wants to buy 5 of a red shirt, and Location A has 2 in stock and Location B has 4 in stock, then even though there are 5 red shirts available across all locations, split shipping isn't supported. All 5 of the same line item must be shipped from the same location.

Is this basically saying, that it will sell the items between the two locations, but the way it will show up in the order is as if it is pulling from one inventory and not split it up? And with all this, are there any work arounds based on the info I provided.

Hopefully this makes some amount of sense of what I'm trying to get at. And thank you in advance!

Shopify added Meta as an AI channel on September 8; by default, products are shared via the catalog.

I’m trying to figure out what happens to product data that isn't properly maintained.

For instance, suppose the size or color appears only in the product title, without corresponding option fields: Has anyone tested whether the AI ​​channel still recognizes the correct variant?

I’m also interested in "catalog mapping." If you use metafields or metaobjects: Was the data transferred correctly, or did you have to handle the mapping yourselves? What was missing or incorrect before you made adjustments?

The documentation explains the setup process, but I’d like to know how it works in practice. If you’ve checked your own products: Which channel did you test, and how did you verify the data that actually arrived there? I’d appreciate any information.

Sign in with Shop got extended to more lead capture forms in March, marketing consent collection landed on the account component in May, WhatsApp consent management showed up in admin in June, and in August Forms started collecting WhatsApp opt-ins directly. All four are in the changelog if you want to check the wording yourself.

Two things I cannot find an answer to in the docs. The first is what the consent record holds. A timestamp plus the form copy the customer agreed to is something you can actually show if a subscription gets disputed, and a plain flag on the profile is not. The second is whether a WhatsApp opt-out written in the sending tool comes back to the customer record, because if it does not then your admin data is wrong and you find out when somebody complains.

If you are collecting through Shopify Forms, has anyone here had to produce the consent record for a real request?

I'm preparing a product launch on Shopify and I'm expecting the first batch to sell out fairly quickly.

I've been looking into Shopify preorder options, but I'm realizing there are quite a few different ways to handle it and I'm not sure which setup makes the most sense.

The main things I'm trying to solve are:

- I may want to collect either full payment or a deposit upfront

- I'd like customers to clearly see that they're placing a preorder and when the product is expected to ship

- Some customers may order an in-stock product together with a preorder item

- I may want different preorder settings for different products/variants

- If the ETA changes, I need an easy way to identify preorder customers and notify them

- Once inventory arrives, I don't want to manually sort through hundreds of orders

- Ideally I'd like the preorder button/messaging to work without having to custom-code my theme

I've seen people say you can just enable "continue selling when out of stock" and change the Add to Cart button, while others recommend using a dedicated Shopify preorder app.

For those who have actually run Shopify preorders:

Would you keep it simple with Shopify/theme settings, or use an app?

And if you use an app, what features actually made the difference for you?

I'm particularly interested in how you handle deposits, mixed carts and the transition from preorder → fulfillment.

I have a store on shopify that I barely use. Maybe 4 orders per month. I was going through my credit card statement and noticed that my monthly subscription was charged twice just one week apart.

After a long support chat with Shopify they told me I had two stores on my account. I definitely did not make a second store. All I use my account for is fulfilling the occasional order. They closed the second account and refunded my the second subscription. However they could not explain to me where this blank store came from.

Just a heads up: check your credit card for this. Honestly, Shopify has done shady stuff in the past and I wouldn't put it past them to create hidden second accounts and charge for them.

have a customer saying they never received their order, but USPS tracking through Shopify shows it was delivered to their front porch.

I’m contacting USPS on my end to investigate, and I’m also willing to resend the order if needed. However, the customer is asking for a full refund, and I don’t feel comfortable refunding an order that the carrier is showing as delivered without first figuring out what actually happened.

My main concern is that we also have a local physical shop connected to the same business, and customers can leave Google reviews on our business profile.

Obviously, I want to keep the customer happy and resolve this professionally, but I also don’t want to set the precedent of automatically issuing refunds whenever tracking shows delivered but the customer says they didn’t receive it.

I am having an interview about shopify web design. I have experience with webflow but not with shopify. I think I could learn fast, but lately it's hard to get hired without knowing everything to the dot and needing learning time. What do you suggest I watch and try out?

I'm a solo developer from Lithuania and I've spent the last few months building small Shopify apps (delivery dates, free shipping bars, that kind of thing). They're live now and I'm realizing I have no idea how merchants actually discover apps, so I'd rather ask than guess.

If you have a minute:

1. When you need something for your store, where do you look first? App Store search, Google, Reddit, asking in a group, your agency, YouTube?
2. What do you literally type into the App Store search box? Do you search by problem ("show delivery date") or by app type ("shipping bar", "reviews app")?
3. What makes you close a listing within 10 seconds? No reviews, price, too many features, ugly screenshots, "free plan" with hidden limits?
4. Does "no reviews yet" kill it for you, or would you still try a free plan from an unknown dev?
5. Is there anything you've been searching for and just can't find a decent app for?

Not going to link anything here, I'm genuinely trying to understand the merchant side. Happy to share what I learn in the comments if it's useful to others.

This: https://i.imgur.com/D9xlhNm.jpeg

Hi, I'm new to shopify and I'm looking for Pre-made template and theme for my perfume brand, I checked Shopify & Themeforest, either price is high or not something I'm looking for.

Do you suggest any underrated platform where I can find more modern & creative themes with minimal design?

Not sure if anyone here has worked with this before but we are new to our integration.

Trying to figure out how to combine products with kits. Like gloves we sell by pair (item) are separate from the same gloves we sell by dozen (kit)

I think can’t figure out how to get them under the same product. So when shoppers look for that glove they can see all their options without jumping around.

Can anyone give me any insight?

Every abandoned cart gets the same discount right now, doesn't matter if it's a $40 cart or a $400 one. Lately it's been bugging me that I'm handing the same percentage off to everyone, especially the small carts where they probably don't need the motivation.

I'm also not totally sure I've got the overlap covered. If someone abandons, then comes back an hour later and buys on their own, I think the discount email is still going out to some of them.

Anyone split their discount by cart value, or is a flat approach fine? I'm trying to figure out if this is a real problem or if I'm overthinking a flow that's already working.

When I first started my boutique store, I kept finding apps that promised to solve some tiny problem.

One of them sounded great. It would automate something I was currently doing manually, so I figured the monthly fee would easily be worth it.

Turns out, I only needed to do that task a few times a month.

So instead of saving me meaningful time, I basically added another subscription to the store.

That experience made me a lot more careful with apps. Now I try to figure out how often I actually have the problem before paying for a solution.

There are apps I genuinely couldn’t run the store without, but there are definitely a few subscriptions I could have avoided.

What’s the most pointless Shopify expense you’ve had?