Our merchants have all sorts of products that need to be active in the online store, but not in other channels - not indexed by openai and not put into the shop app by default.
These include POS only products, wholesale only products, retail only products that need to be visible but not purchaseable - a whole slew of products that SHOULD BE PRODUCTS - but should not be in places that we don’t want them, like the shop app. This is creating huge issues for multiple merchants we support.
PLEASE PLEASE bring back some kind of channel controls here - the new unlisted products are great but they don’t help with this issue - for instance, a collection of products only available in store, or the products on dedicated wholesale accounts, or all the other products that worked perfectly well in all our systems until this change.
Does duplicating the product and hiding one set not work? (i.e using the seo.hidden custom metafield or unlisted product status.)
SEO hidden doesn’t fully solve this because in many cases we want these products visible as products in the online store - for instance - products that wholesale customers can buy, or products that link to a store locator. THEORETICALLY seo.hidden removes a product - but we’ve seen other exclusion rules (like not having shipping rates) not work consistently to remove products from the shop app (and presumably everywhere else that uses the new catalog)
Can’t you manage sales channel publications for the resource? To control where it’s published to?
NO! This change: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/promoting-marketing/seo/shopify-catalog makes it so the only way to keep products out of the shopify catalog is a series of hoops: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/promoting-marketing/seo/shopify-catalog#considerations they’re presented as positives (must be, cant be) but there’s no simple way to exlude products from the unified catalog - which is the thing that’s really hurting us. Not only that, but we’ve seen that these rules aren’t followed consistently - where products that shouldn’t be eligible (for instance, without a shipping zone) are still showing up in the shop app. Everything would be fine if there were an “exclude from catalog” metafield similar to seo.hidden. But as far as I can tell there’s no notion that products would be Online Store only - which… I kind of need some of them to be.
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That doesn’t solve for the multiple usecases I mentioned - for instance, instore only products that still need informational listings. Or Wholesale only products that need to show up for wholesale / b2b customers.