Tried contacting support – they told us Shopify disregards all Shop channel settings and puts products + pricing on Shop regardless. Also said there’s no way to get our store or products off Shopify Shop unless we want to stop using shopify or make our products completely hidden from all web searches (in other words, no one can find our products or store unless they type in our url…because they’ll never find it in a google search, for example).
This is an issue for all sorts of merchants. Selling wholesale? too bad, everyone can see your pricing even if you’ve turned off Shop channel. Only selling to approved customers? too bad, everyone can find your store and products and see your pricing regardless of the Shop channel settings you’ve turned off. And tons more issues…
Uninstalling does not make your products undiscoverable in Shop. Unpublishing does not make your products undiscoverable in Shop. It’s stated over and over.
No worries. This was a hard pill to swallow at first. Before products could be set to any sales channel you want. Now it’s just one giant catalog that everything feeds from. The “publishing” is really misleading now. When you think it’s not “published” to the Shop app, it’s really just changing the checkout method.
Most of the time this occurs because the Shop app pulls from the Online Store sales channel and not just from the Shop channel toggle. Product data may stay indexed cached for a little while even if the channel is uninstalled. A viable workaround is to not publish products to the Online Store and manage them through a private app or password protect access for wholesale. You can also control product visibility at the product, category, and brand levels using automated collections and metafields to determine what information is sent to Shop. This usually takes care of the exposure you don’t want without you having to exit the platform altogether.
It’s not “indexed cached for a little while even if channel is uninstalled.” Check out Our products live on Shop channel even though we've uninstalled channel and no products set to be live on it - #3 by Maximus3
And it’s not a “viable workaround” not to publish any products online and remove products from all search results.
But, yeah, we already use password protection, customer application/approval, etc. None of this is the issue. It’s not about any one merchant’s requirements.
This is about how Shopify makes products + pricing live on its SHOP regardless of (in spite of!) the SHOP settings merchants have made. It’s also about the extensive and costly customization Shopify sneakily requires to merely use its platform the way its advertised: in other words, simply for products that merchants choose not to make live on SHOP via the settings shopify itself provides to actually not be live on the SHOP.
Shopify misrepresents, even misleads, merchants about the control they have over their own store, products, info, and more.
