What’s your biggest time-waster when it comes to running your store?
Topic summary
Store owners identify their primary productivity bottlenecks:
Shipping Policy Management:
- Manual entry of individual items into shipping policies is time-consuming
- Request for bulk assignment by product type remains unaddressed by Shopify despite multiple complaints
AI Product Categorization Issues:
- AI frequently misclassifies music products (records, cassettes)
- Examples include: music cassettes tagged as bicycle parts or erotic videos, records defaulting to wrong categories, cassettes identified as needlecraft canvas
- The AI doesn’t learn from corrections and cannot be disabled
- Screenshots demonstrate repeated categorization failures
Text Formatting Problems:
- Pasting track listings into product descriptions triggers automatic reformatting
- Adding spaces after pasted content causes unwanted layout changes
Customer Service Demands:
- Initially underestimated as “easy” work
- Outsourcing failed due to insufficient product knowledge
- Solution: in-house training to free up time for other business priorities
The discussion remains open with no resolutions offered for the technical issues raised.
Having to place EACH individual item into a shipping policy.
I’ve complained to Shopify MORE than five times that I should be able to create a shipping policy that allows me to place product TYPES into it. IE EVERY product that I create of a certain type is automatically entered into whichever shipping policy.
Shopify just will NOT do that. Beyond garbage.
The AI that helps with generating product information is a MASSIVE time suck as well.
It rarely ever gets the genre correct from the music that I am entering as new products. It refuses to accept that I want records in the Records & Lp’s category, instead it just keeps defaulting to vinyl in music category. It will think that an audio cassette is a bicycle cassette.
It would be great if y’all could turn it off. It doesn’t learn. It’s garbage and it’s wasting my time.
As per the screenshot. Entering a music cassette and the stupid AI thinks it’s an erotic video. GARBAGE. TURN IT OFF.
When I paste
a list of items, say a track listing in the product description by pasting the track listing into the product listing as per the first screenshot, whenever I try to add a space after the track listing in the product description Shopify automatically reformats the list as per the second screenshot. BEYOND ANNOYING.
Customer service 
learned the hard way early on. It sounded like “easy” work, but in reality it’s the forefront of the business. I tried to outsource it, but their product knowledge wasn’t good, so we ended up training in‑house and now I can focus on the things I love more.