Can product variants only display on POS, not ecommerce?

Retail & Point of Sale

Topic summary

A user seeks to display product variants exclusively on POS while hiding them from the ecommerce storefront. Their specific use case involves a craft beer bar selling cans online (440ml only) but needing multiple serving sizes (½ pint, ⅔ pint, 1 pint, 440ml) available in-store via POS.

Current Limitations:

  • Shopify does not support channel-specific variant visibility
  • Publishing/unpublishing applies to entire products, not individual variants
  • Products must be published online to appear in inventory management tools like Stocky

Suggested Workarounds:

  • Create duplicate products: one with all variants for POS, another with limited variants for ecommerce
  • Avoid using variants entirely—create separate products for each option with descriptive titles
  • Use the “Camouflage” app (mentioned briefly)

Status:
This remains an unresolved issue with multiple users requesting the feature over time. The discussion reflects ongoing frustration with Shopify’s variant management across sales channels, with no native solution available. Users continue seeking this functionality for various scenarios including event-based POS sales, drop-shipping automation, and inventory that’s too fragile/heavy to ship online.

Summarized with AI on October 29. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
5

Exactly, just one variant would be available on e-commerce.

So we run a small craft beer bar and currently we are selling some of our beer in cans (we can it ourselves) and sell it online for delivery. Currently we

are only selling cans of the product, so there is no variant set at the moment.

However, when we open the bar in future, we will want the same products on the POS but to be available in different measures:-

1/2 pint

2/3 pint

1 pint

440ml can

Essentially I dont want people ordering on e-commerce to be able to choose anything else, other than the 440ml can size.

Hope that makes sense.