I’m a new Shopify Plus member and it’s not going well at all. I was promised all sorts of better performance and tools to run B2B. After 60 days of trying to add products to catalogs and $2,500 a month it’s been a terrible experience. I have another account I’m working with and I will not be recommending PLUS to them. Having the ability to add products to a catalog using metafields, I thought would be a no brainer. It’s not working out at all from what I was promised. Also, PLUS support isn’t what I was expecting either. The 2 agents I spoke with didn’t really know the catalog section at all. Very Frustrated!
Topic summary
Main issue: A new Shopify Plus merchant is dissatisfied with B2B Catalogs performance and tools versus sales promises.
- After 60 days and at $2,500/month, adding products to catalogs remains difficult. The expected ability to build catalogs using metafields (custom product fields) is not working as promised.
- Support experience is poor; two Plus agents reportedly lacked knowledge of the catalog feature.
- The merchant is very frustrated and intends not to recommend Plus to another account they manage.
Status: No resolution or actionable guidance provided in the thread. Key unmet need is a reliable method or support for adding products to catalogs via metafields.
Sorry to hear your frustration @joe6367.
I’m not too surprised about your experience, but that does not help you one bit; according to my experience – and this is my personal take, once a merchant is ready to spend the amount that the PLUS plan costs, in many, many instances they may be much better off, going with another solution; at least based on the aspects that you mentioned. (Transactional fees vs. fixed expenses may make it cheaper for high volume merchants to run PLUS.)
Hiring a software company, building an ecommerce solution based on a open source system will often be the better way to go. In the long run probably also in terms of ROI, definitely though in terms of freedom and flexibility. Unfortunately there’s also agencies out there, building part of their business on the fact, that Shopify pays a comfortable monthly kick back upon referring clients into the PLUS tier.
That being said – if you give us some details about what the exact task at hand is, what you’ve already tried and where you’re stuck, we might still be able to help. (Granted, that is indeed, what PLUS support should be able to help you with … should.)
Thanks!
Ya, adding to catalogs can be cumbersome. Have you tried using the bulk editor or the Publishing settings (for the product?) Those seem like the easiest way to quickly add products to catalogs. The bulk is better for doing multiple products. But it’s still a manual process and might not be what you’re looking for. Just brainstorming some ideas for ya. 
What I’ve done in a lot of instances where metafields weren’t supported was sort our products by metafield, add a tag to those products in bulk, then use the tag to add them to a catalog. It’s an extra step, but it’s usually only like 1 extra minute spent per metafield.