We are increasingly finding that the clients we onboard—and the mature, investment-backed brands we target—are running into three specific platform limitations. These limitations create doubt and require workarounds for what otherwise is expected platform functionality in the eyes of brands looking for migrate to Shopify.
Here are three key features we believe are important for Shopify’s continued move upmarket.
1. Price Scheduling: datetime Start/End for Catalog Prices
Add valid_from and valid_until timestamps to the PriceList (or equivalent pricing) API.
A core feature of any ERP is future-dated price lists (e.g., “Q4 promotional pricing starts November 1st,” “Annual price increase effective January 1st”).
Because Shopify prices are effective immediately upon API write
This adds a significant, time-sensitive point of failure. If list prices are not updated at the right time, the client’s pricing is wrong.
By building scheduling into the platform, an integration could push all known future-dated prices to the platform. Shopify would be responsible for making them active at the correct time. This is architecturally cleaner, more robust, and radically simplifies integrations.
2. Universal Quantity Rules (Min/Increment/Max)
Make B2B-style quantity rules (minimum, maximum, increment/step) available on all catalog types, not just B2B-specific catalogs.
D2C businesses have standard business logic like “must buy in cases of 6” or “minimum order of 3.” These are fundamental product-level rules, not just B2B rules. Great examples include wine sellers, spare part shops.
Move quantity rules to the core product/variant data model or add support on all types of catalogs. This creates a single, enforceable source of truth that is applied across all channels (Online Store, POS, API) without custom code.
3. Catalog-Level Pricing for Customer Segments
Allow PriceLists or Market pricing to be associated directly with a Customer Segment.
We need to show different base prices to different D2C customer segments (e.g., “VIP,” “Loyalty Tier 2”).
The current “solution” is to use Automatic Discounts or Shopify Functions. This is architecturally incorrect and creates a poor user experience.
This is a cart/checkout-level operation. A VIP customer sees the full, public price (e.g., $100) on the product and collection pages. Only in the cart or at checkout do they see a discount applied (e.g., “-$10”).
This is not a promotion; it is their price. For a VIP or tiered-membership customer, their price is $90. Showing it as a $100 product with a $10 discount is confusing and clutters order data. It also fails to show the correct, persuasive price to the user while they are browsing.
We need a catalog-level operation. By associating a PriceList with a Customer Segment, a logged-in VIP customer would see $90 as the base price on the product page, collection page, and at checkout. This provides a clean data model, a correct UX, and aligns with how mature loyalty programs function.
These three features are all related to the same theme: moving essential, mature business logic out of brittle custom code (themes, functions, middleware) and into the core Shopify platform.
Enabling these features natively would make Shopify a more robust and scalable platform, reduce our development overhead as partners, and make it far easier to migrate large, complex clients onto Shopify Plus.