B2b catalog export - bizarre default choices

Shopify Plus
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1

Hi,

can i ask if anyone else has had issues with how the b2b catalog export is set up?

currently if you go into a particular catalog, and choose to export as a csv, there is a dropdown of options:

  • All products
  • Only included products
  • Only products with fixed prices
  • Only products with quantity rules

the default is set to All Products, which for some reason exports the catalog you just selected, but includes every product in your store as part of the catalog, regardless of whether it was there before. this is on a menu for a catalog you’ve already been through 3 menus to get to, which should be enough of an indicator that you only want the products that are in the catalog itself. if you wanted to export all products, there’s an option for that on the catalog main page.

if you’re aware of this, then you can simply select “only included products” and you will get the catalog as intended, but having “all products” as a default seems a very strange choice, given the amount of problems it can cause if exported and reimported without anyone noticing.

having the highest impact yet least likely to be wanted option as default seems like atrocious UX, and is potentially catastrophic for anyone with very curated catalogs, especially seeing as export/import as csv is pretty much the only way to interact with these catalogs outside of manually updating each product.

I spoke to support about this, and they seemed to think this was a feature, not a bug, but it seems to us that “only included products” should be the default, no?

2

I did ask support to pass this on to the dev team, and have educated my colleagues about the complications this can cause and how to avoid this pitfall, but yeah, it did take a few runs at it to get the right information out of the export.