Frustrating: No Shareable Preview Links for Theme Rollouts

Online Store and Theme Development
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Short description of issue

Theme Rollouts do not provide a shareable preview URL, making it impossible to collect stakeholder feedback before publishing.

Reproduction steps

Reproduction steps

  1. Create a Theme Rollout with changes to the live theme.
  2. Save the rollout without publishing.
  3. Attempt to generate a shareable preview link for the rollout.
  4. Try using ?treatment=<rollout_id> on the storefront URL.
  5. Observe that there is no supported way to share the rollout preview outside of the Theme Editor.

Additional info

Theme Rollouts are a great addition to Shopify, but they’re missing one key feature: a way to share a preview before publishing.

Today, the only way to preview a rollout is from within the Theme Editor. That makes it difficult to share changes with teammates and gather feedback before going live.

We initially tried using ?treatment=<rollout_id>, but Shopify Plus Support confirmed that there isn’t currently a supported way to generate a shareable preview URL for Theme Rollouts.

It would be great if Theme Rollouts supported preview links similar to draft themes, allowing merchants to:

  • Share a preview of the rollout before publishing.
  • Gather feedback and approvals before changes go live.
  • Review the storefront experience without requiring access to the Theme Editor.

This would make Theme Rollouts much more useful as part of a typical review and QA process.

What type of topic is this

Feature request

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Thanks @Carlos_Galdamez, I went through our Rollouts documentation and confirmed there’s no supported way to generate a shareable preview URL for a rollout.

I’ve submitted a feature request on your behalf, highlighting the stakeholder review and QA use case you described.

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Interested in this too. @KyleG-Shopify Also noticed that in the theme editor, cart ajax calls are loading the original version of the theme, disregarding the treatments applied in a cart section.

So, changing a quantity or adding a new product to the cart loads the wrong version of the cart section. Toggling a theme parameter or reloading the page loads the right treatment version back. This does not seem to affect the production experience, only the theme editor. Still, very confusing.

Something the technical team should investigate.