Shop.app. We only appear in search results for one country...

[Fanfi]

Hi there,

Today I was playing around with shop.app, and I realized something very annoying.

Context:
We are a shop based in Japan (our suppliers are in Japan), we are selling worldwide, but almost nothing in Japan. USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and Europe, are our main markets.

Issue:

In shop.app, our products appear in the search results only for people who want to ship to Japan. If I choose to ship to the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and Europe, our products do not appear in the search results.

Assumption:

Except for Japan, for which we set shipping costs manually, we use a third-party app to calculate and display shipping costs at checkout. I guess the issue is linked to that...

Can anyone confirm and possibly help?

[Fanfi]

Nobody? No Shopify staff around?

[Fanfi]

Apparently, my assumption wasn't correct, because if I place one of our products in my Shop App favorites, when I do a search from a country other than Japan, I still don't see our products in the search results. However, I can access the product I've saved in my favorites, and then on the product page I can see that it ship to the country I'm set in (not Japan).

So Shop App knows that we are shipping our products in many countries.

So I really don't understand why our products don't appear in the search results for people searching with an address outside of Japan... 

[Fanfi]

I contacted Shopify support about this. The guy I spoke to was nice and tried to help, but he basically acted as an intermediary between me and a "specialized” team that was very inefficient and gave me the impression to be not qualified and wasn’t trying to really understand the issue.

#1 When people search for something, there are millions of results and your product may not be prioritized.

Well, for many of my products, when I do a search, there are less than 50 results (not millions), and none of my products are among them.

#2 Search results only show products from stores based in the customer's country.

This is obviously false, because when I search with addresses in different countries, I see the same stores (but not us) appear in the search results.

It's very frustrating, I'm very confident it's a glitch, but the specialized team wasn't even trying... 😡