Nitpick: pressing the little “plus” button picks a random color. Not just a random selection from “recently used” but a fully random color.
What I want to add when I press that button is so easy to guess. It’s “my most common color that isn’t already a variable”. In other words: the existing hex values, ranked by count, excluding values in the palette. So every time a merchant presses + they get a value that probably should be a variable but isn’t.
It might be slow to calculate all that. It’s definitely faster than manually clicking around a site to guess at which values should be variables instead of one-offs.
It should at least populate from the values in recently used. Just adding random colors is madness.
It’s great to see you both trying out the new color palette setting!
I was able to reproduce the issue with color settings defaulting to transparent, using both rgba(0,0,0,0) and #00000000. I have flagged this for investigation. For now, the practical workaround is to set the initial value to a solid color.
Thanks for the added notes on palette variables in color scheme previews and the + button adding a random color. I have passed that feedback along too.
Thanks for looking at this @Paige-Shopify . The transparent bug is not about a workaround now, it’s basically something that’s probably bugging tens of thousands of merchants right now, since themes have been setting transparent defaults for years.
I can create schemes from the palette colors in JSON but once they are unmapped, merchants have no way to remap the values. It’s a confusing first-run experience, just clicking around and learning how it works destroys the initial state and there is no way to recreate it.
@Paige-Shopify there is still the issue with the inability to go back to transparent after choosing a color. Previously, when you removed a color it defaulted to transparent, now it defaults to black: Zight Recording 2026-06-18 ...
@Paige-Shopify Any updates on the color picker transparency bug? This is affecting a lot of our shops so ideally a fix can be rolled out soon. It is an issue on the color pickers without an alpha property set to true. Thanks!
Hi @Anne, we don’t have an update to share on the follow-up fix yet.
For now, the only workaround is to edit the relevant JSON directly and set the transparent value there, such as the template .json file for sections or settings_data.json for global theme settings. I know that isn’t convenient for merchants unless they have someone comfortable editing theme code, but that’s the current path for setting a color value with alpha.
Hi all, thanks for your patience regarding the follow-up fix.
You can now enter #00000000 or transparent to go back to transparent after choosing a color.
