Private storefront api app is automatically a sales channel

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Topic summary

Issue: A developer built a custom “recently viewed” section using cookies and a Shopify development app with Storefront API (GraphQL) to fetch product data. Initially all products returned correctly.

Update: After new products were added, queries for those items return null while existing products still work. Investigation suggests the dev app is being treated as a sales channel, requiring product availability to be enabled per product for data to return.

Need: They don’t want a separate sales channel—only basic product data (titles, links, media) for on-site display.

Questions posed: Is the Storefront API app misconfigured? Is there a better approach to access product data without toggling per-product sales channel availability?

Status: No resolution yet; guidance requested on configuration or alternative method.

Summarized with AI on December 29. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hi there,

I’m working on creating a custom ‘recently viewed’ section on a store using cookies. I created a development app on the store with storefront api access to fetch the data using a GraphQL query, and that works well. All data for the products was being fetched and shown correctly on the store.

Now they have added some new products to the store, and I noticed that each of those products returned a null object instead of the actual product data. After some digging around, I found that my custom develop app is somehow a sales channel that I need to turn on for each product? I have no need for it to be a separate sales channel, I just want to get some product data like titles, links and media, to show on the site.

Is my develop app not set up correctly with the storefront api or is there a better approach? I’ve looked around but couldn’t find a similar issue / solution.

Thanks!