Possible Regression: Bundle Line Item Properties Propagating to Children Again - Request for Clarification

[prakhar]

Hi team,

We are observing behavior that appears similar to the previously reported issue regarding bundle line item properties propagating to child items.

For reference, here is the earlier thread where this was discussed and subsequently reverted:

Bundle Line Item Properties Now Propagating to Children – Causing Merchant Issues

Hey everyone, It looks like Shopify has rolled out a recent change that’s now live for all merchants. All Bundle Line Item Properties set on the parent item are now being automatically propagated to all the child items . This is unexpectedly causing a lot of confusion for many merchants who depend on custom line item properties for: Fulfillment logic Third-party integrations Custom reporting or analytics Unique customizations per item We’ve seen this start affecting live stores already —…

In that thread, the change was acknowledged and later rolled back. However, we are now seeing similar behavior again in live stores.

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Current Behavior

When a bundle has line item properties defined on the parent line item, those properties are now appearing on each expanded child item in the order.

This is creating unexpected order-level changes for merchants.

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Merchant Impact

From a technical perspective, we can adapt to changing semantics if needed. The larger issue is the merchant experience.

This change appears sudden from the merchant’s point of view:

• Merchants are seeing additional properties on child items that were not previously visible.
• Orders now display significantly more metadata than before.
• It creates the perception of duplication or malfunction.
• Support teams receive tickets assuming something is broken.

When these changes occur without prior communication, they feel like regressions rather than intentional improvements, both to us and to merchants.

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If This Behavior Is Intentional

If the propagation of parent properties to children is now intended and permanent behavior, a few UI improvements would significantly reduce confusion:

1. Collapse child line item properties by default in the Admin UI
   If these properties must be visible, having them collapsed by default (expandable when needed) would reduce visual noise and improve clarity.
2. Hide _-prefixed properties by default
   In the earlier thread, Michael mentioned the idea of hiding _ properties (with an eye toggle to reveal them). That approach would be extremely helpful for apps that use _-prefixed properties for internal/system metadata.
   Reference:
   Bundle Line Item Properties Now Propagating to Children – Causing Merchant Issues - #14 by michael

These changes would meaningfully improve merchant QoL while preserving transparency when needed.

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Request for Clarification

Could the team please clarify:

• Is this propagation intentional?
• If yes, is this now the defined and stable behavior for bundle line item properties?
• Are there planned Admin UI updates around property visibility?
• Was this rollout documented somewhere that we may have missed?

We are happy to adapt our implementation as needed. Our primary concern is ensuring predictable behavior and minimizing merchant confusion.

If changes like this can be communicated or discussed ahead of time, we can proactively inform merchants and train our support teams accordingly.

Thank you for the clarification.

[michael]

+1. Thanks @prakhar for creating a new post and for articulating this so clearly

Our teams had to deal with this over the weekend, lets hope Shopify folks can respond with clearance by EOD today @Liam-Shopify @Alan_G

[seempaq]

Yeah this is really bad when also OTHER apps have some metadata showing and most of your store are bundles, it’s a complete mess visually and operationally.

[Anthony_SL]

+1 on this. Can confirm this issue started appearing for us too.

@prakhar ‘s suggestions if this is intentional are spot on as are the questions we need clarification on ASAP.

We’re currently communicating this to merchants as a bug, but if its a new ‘feature’, we need to know.

[Paige-Shopify]

@prakhar Thanks for the detailed feedback We really appreciate it and will take it into consideration.

To answer your questions:

• Is this propagation intentional? Yes.
• If yes, is this now the defined and stable behavior for bundle line item properties? Yes, UI wise.
• Are there planned Admin UI updates around property visibility? We can’t share details on planned updates, but we’re always open to your feedback.
• Was this rollout documented somewhere that we may have missed? We don’t typically release a changelog update regarding smaller admin UI-only improvements.

[Anthony_SL]

Thanks for the response @Paige-Shopify

Is it possible to raise a feature request to get these new details collapsed by default?

Having them open by default is creating a lot of confusion for our merchants.

[Min_Liu]

Hi @Paige-Shopify

I would advocate that line items starting with _ are hidden altogether (or collapsed by default) as these are intended to not be visible to the end customer.

Better yet, regarding @Gil-Shopify’s announcement on cart metafields that carry forward directly into the order, it would be good if there was a ‘line item metafield’ which apps could use instead of line item properties however i would like to see this passed through the carrier service API as well as line item properties are currently the only way to pass meta data across to shipping apps at the moment.

[Paige-Shopify]

@Anthony_SL, absolutely. I’ve documented these as feature requests on our end:

1. Collapse child line item properties by default in the Admin UI
2. Hide _-prefixed properties by default

@Min_Liu I’ll document that as a feature request as well.

[Ash]

Thanks for the update! I just wanted to note, there seems to be multiple changes in play here.

1. Cart transformer logic, expand operation now auto propagates line item properties from parent to all children.
2. Small order admin UI change.

We did have control on which properties passed to children in the expand operation. Now both the parents properties and any passed properties in the cart transformer are added to the children.

[matt-cotton-carmats]

@Paige-Shopify Towards the end of last week, I noticed that all line item properties are now being minimised, in the order admin, see attached screenshot. This includes properties that are not prefixed with _. I’ve had lot of complaints from our customer support team about this change. When viewing an order they now have to expand these properties for each item in the order. This adds a lot of clicks to their day.

Is this change intentional? From what I’ve read above there was a request to minimise properties prefixed with _not all properties.

[Paige-Shopify]

Hi @matt-cotton-carmats appreciate the immediate feedback on the change we made after the feedback provided in this thread.

The goal was to minimize properties prefixed with underscores. Checking on this now.