Why is Cart Transform lineUpdate limited to Shopify Plus?

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1

I’m trying to understand the reasoning behind restricting the Cart Transform lineUpdate operation to Shopify Plus stores.

lineUpdate feels like a fundamental cart functionality, especially for apps that need to adjust the price, title, or presentation of an existing cart line. However, non-Plus merchants are forced to use workarounds such as lineExpand, even when the use case is not really a bundle or component-based product.

This feels inconsistent with Shopify’s goal of providing the best checkout experience. lineUpdate is a fundamental cart operation, and merchants are understandably requesting simple changes like updating a line’s price, title, or image. Yet developers can’t deliver these basic requests without relying on workarounds that introduce unnecessary complexity, awkward cart states, and often a worse checkout and order experience.

I don’t want this to come across as a rant. Shopify has been great for me I make my living building Shopify stores, developing public apps and running my own ecommerce stores.

What I’m struggling with isn’t just this specific limitation. It’s the broader philosophy of limiting platform capabilities on behalf of merchants. A good example is the metafield size limits that were introduced for performance reasons.

I completely understand wanting to protect checkout speed and platform performance. Every merchant has different priorities and use cases. Shopify can’t anticipate every legitimate need, and developers constantly run into situations where the platform is capable of solving a problem, but an artificial limitation forces us into awkward workarounds instead.

It feels like Shopify is making decisions for merchants rather than giving them the information and tools to make those decisions themselves.

2

Hey @Verlo

You’re reading the current behaviour correctly. lineUpdate, including price, title, and image overrides, is currently limited to development stores and Shopify Plus stores. That restriction applies regardless of whether the app is public or custom.

I also definitely get the distinction you’re making here: lineExpand can technically cover some pricing scenarios on non-Plus stores, but it changes the structure and presentation of the cart line, so it isn’t a clean substitute when the use case isn’t actually a bundle or component product.

I definitely get it’s not ideal, so I can for sure pass along the feedback that the current restriction forces apps into more complex implementations and can produce some potentially not as great checkout and order experiences.

If you can share which part is most important for your merchants, like price, title, or image updates, and a use case example, that would help strengthen the product feedback on my side.

Hope to hear from you soon - let me know if I can clarify anything further here.