I’m a merchant running Preserve East and I’m dealing with two critical issues that support chat has been unable to resolve. Posting here hoping Shopify staff can help escalate. This is the first issue, i will do a 2nd post for the other issue.
Issue 1: Shop app is redirecting customers to other stores
My store and products do not appear in Shop.app search results at all. When I searched for one of my own products — a seersucker patch that I confirmed exists and is active in my store (with the right title, description and tags) — this is the exact response Shop.app returned:
“I couldn’t surface that exact Preserve East seersucker patch in the current catalog, so I stayed close to the look you were clearly after and kept everything in USD.”
It then showed products from other stores. This is not a neutral indexing delay. The Shop app is intercepting searches that include my store name and product, telling the customer my item doesn’t exist, and sending them to competitors. This needs to be treated as a critical defect.
I have been told by support to wait. I have been waiting. This has been going on since Sunday.
Before a staff member escalates this, check these two quick settings to make sure your product data isn’t blocked in the backend:
Verify Product Availability: Go to your Products list and click on your seersucker patch. On the right side under Sales Channels, click Manage and make sure the Shop channel box is explicitly checked. (If it is, uncheck it, save, and re-check it to force a manual data re-sync).
Check Shop Channel Eligibility: Go to Sales Channels > Shop > Status inside your admin. Make sure your store hasn’t been quietly flagged for a Merchant Guidelines violation (like missing tracking numbers or verification steps), which instantly hides products from the global index.
If everything looks perfect and green on your dashboard, reply to this post with your Support Ticket ID. Leaving it here allows community moderators to pull up your files and escalate this directly to the Shop App engineering team as a critical bug.
Thank you. I did have the sales channels set correctly but i unchecked, saved and rechecked then saved again as you suggested. I don’t know if they combined my two issues, but this is the ticket number 67219995.
The rep in the chat said “I am seeing that you are absolutely correct, you’ve placed great descriptions, have tags on your products, the only thing I see you are missing would be alt texts for your images, this also improves your overall SEO”.
I did add alt texts for all images as he suggested but that isn’t the overall issue. Same thing still happens. Thanks!
Update: I tested the Shop app again and when pushed, it explained the issue itself — it can see my product exists on my page but says my shop page and purchasable feed are out of sync. This confirms it’s a backend catalog/feed issue on Shopify’s end, not anything wrong with my listings. Attaching screenshot. Can a staff member please look into why my purchasable feed is not syncing?
Odd, it is still not working for me. And I did relax the first 3 days but then last night it had been going on to long and support validated the issue but couldn’t help.
The more it’s searched, the more it’s sold, the more ratings it gets, the more it’s going to come into a regular search. That is the algorithm. That is Shopify’s crappy ai working. But keep in mind also, your lobster patch, and many of your products, are pre-order. That plays a big part in visibility too.
I guess the reason why the AI is bypassing your listing and sending people to competitors: the pre-order status .
The Shop app’s search algorithm is heavily biased toward immediate fulfillment. If a customer searches for an exact phrase, but your matching item is flagged as a pre-order (or out of stock but continuing to sell), the AI will often suppress it. It assumes the customer wants to buy and receive an item right now, so it intentionally surfaces “in-stock” items from other stores instead to secure an immediate conversion.
To test this and fix your visibility, you might want to try taking the “pre-order” flag off that specific lobster patch. Put it as regular “in-stock” inventory and just note the shipping delay clearly in the product description. Wait a day or two, and you will likely see the Shop app algorithm stop hiding your product from exact searches.
It is incredibly frustrating that Shopify’s AI prioritizes competitor stock over an exact brand match just because of a pre-order tag, but at least you now know exactly what is triggering the redirect!
