Is anyone else having issues with Shopify’s new “Add-to-cart limit” feature — and why did Shopify add a feature to limit sales, then automatically turn it on in everyone’s stores without telling anyone?
We’ve had multiple complaints from customers trying to place bulk orders. When they attempt to order more than 140 units, the quantity either reverts to 140 or they get a Shopify-branded error. It took us a few hours to even figure out why this was happening.
Apparently, Shopify quietly rolled out a new feature called “Add-to-cart limit” — buried at the bottom of the cart section in settings — and automatically turned it on without informing store owners.
This is affecting even our custom products, which are clearly marked to continue selling when out of stock.
Because customers can’t enter the quantity they want — especially when ordering above 140 units to take advantage of our tiered bulk discounts — they never make it to checkout. That means they’re not captured in the abandoned checkout flow, and we lose the sale entirely with no way to follow up.
Thankfully, some of our loyal customers reached out asking what was going on, which is how we discovered this issue. Not a great mess to wake up to today.
We’ve contacted Shopify customer support multiple times, and no one could give us a clear explanation. There was zero communication or heads-up about this feature being released, and even worse — after we turned it off and hit save, it just keeps turning itself back on.
To make matters worse, the feature is full of bugs. We’ve toggled it off, saved the settings, and watched it automatically re-enable itself. When I explained this to customer support, their suggestion was: “Just raise the limit.”
Raise it to what?? Why would I ever want to limit how much a customer can buy?
As an e-commerce seller with over 20 years of experience, I can confidently say I’ve never once thought, “Hmm, I’m making too many sales — maybe I should set a limit on how many I get.”
Shopify should contact their developers and ask who thought this was a good idea — or who even asked for it in the first place. Rolling out a feature like this without notice, and enabling it across all stores by default, is actively harming merchants.
Merchants can already manage inventory per product through the Inventory Management or Product Page sections of Shopify.
We don’t need an additional feature that limits sales — especially not on pre-orders, custom-made items, or products that are sold frequently and in bulk.
This kind of restriction makes no sense for high-volume or made-to-order businesses.
This isn’t a minor issue or a harmless new feature — it’s causing lost sales, wasted time, and broken customer trust. We need real answers of why this happened, and we need this feature fixed or just removed.
