We’re using the evergreen AppBridge from Shopify’s CDN. It appears that Shopify changed the product picker automatically for accounts that are using the new variant limits.
The new picker has some good ideas, but it introduces a significant breaking change in the way search works:
The merchant has to input an entire SKU to find a variant by SKU. It’s an exact-match search only. In the previous version, the search was probably done with a “contains” or “start with” kind of method.
Since this is a breaking change, can we opt out of the new window, or can the search mechanism be changed back to a flexible string search?
We’re already getting complaints from merchants now. I think this kind of change in the interface should be opt-in, otherwise it has the potential to somewhat break an app in production.
Hi,
Connecting with the App Bridge team to see what their recommendation is regarding this update - is variant search a central feature of your app? Is this a public app?
Hi Liam,
yes, this is absolutely central, as is the search for title and others. The search needs to go back to working like before.
We’re already getting more emails of complaints, threats of cancellations etc.
More than this being essential for our app, the promise of the CDN AppBridge was no breaking changes. We can’t have any breaking change go live in production like this, without our explicit input. We can’t get any work done now.
I just want to mention that the search in the Products page of the admin still works with SKUs and barcodes in a “starts with” kind of way.
We need that same behaviour back in the AppBridge.
From what I’ve seen, merchants almost never enter the entire SKU (or barcode) to search for something in the picker. SKUs are often long and complex. A merchant often enters the first few characters of that, which is sufficient to narrow it down to a small group, and picks the item from that.
I saw this behaviour yesterday which made the picker search experience horrible, but it looks like it’s since been reverted to the original picker search behaviour (no. extra filter dropdown).
There doesn’t seem to be any reference of this in changelog.shopify.com
Hi Ethan, the new picker is still live. It only shows for stores that have the higher variant limit, which are more and more each day. I’m asking merchants to have some patience with us, while we wait for a solution.
There’s no mention of the new design in the change log, and AppBridge docs still show the “old” one in their screenshots.
I think the new picker has some useful filters, but it should’ve defaulted to the previous behaviour, and let us and/or merchants opt-in to the new stuff.
I’m really hoping Shopify can reverse this quickly. We already stress over testing and managing dependencies all the time. When a “stable” dependency changes overnight in production, without consent or warning, the impact on us and customers can be significant.
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Hey folks - our team are still looking into improving this, appreciate your patience here.
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Thank you, Liam.
The SKU and Barcode search appear to be working like before. I’ll report back here if I hear from merchants about any other difficulties they may experience with the new picker.
