Even if you don’t have any products live on SHOP channel and even if you uninstall the SHOP channel, your active products and their prices are still live on Shopify SHOP regardless. Pretty sneaky and downright dirty of Shopify, eh?
And even if Shopify’s (useless) AI Bot tells you that your store and/or products can be removed from SHOP (screenshot below), turns out that’s a dirty trick by Shopify – Shopify support humans told us products cannot be removed from SHOP and doesn’t matter whether we make products live on SHOP or not and doesn’t matter whether we uninstall SHOP channel. Products + pricing are live on SHOP.
The only option is to make all your products undiscoverable across any and all web searches or to completely stop selling online.
Hoping to make more merchants aware of this – Shopify disregards your SHOP settings and gives false info in support and there’s no alternative other than to stop using shopify or to make your store/products completely undiscoverable in all web searches + more.
Obviously, there are so many issues here. Why is Shopify giving merchants settings that Shopify actually ignores? Why is Shopify so completely out of touch with doing business in the real world that Shopify thinks everyone using Shopify wants their products + pricing visible on Shop? Especially when Shopify pushes apps specifically designed to control when and who sees pricing, how to control who is able to purchase from shopify stores, and more?
Shopify chat support is totally unhelpful regarding all of this, but there’s no other way to reach Shopify. Will you help and let Shopify know you’re not okay with all this? It’s only when enough customers complain that anything changes.
this is totally not true – shopify human chat support says there’s no way to remove products from SHOP other than to stop selling through Shopify or to make all your products completely undiscoverable across any and all web searches
And it doesn’t matter whether your products are not live on Shop channel or even if you uninstall Shop channel – Shopify still has your products live on Shop and shows your products pricing on Shop
I’m actually surprised this isn’t talked about more. There are some threads. I believe @PaulNewton mentioned this here a few months ago and of course reddit has something about it.
After over THREE HOURS in chats with human shopify support reps (which we finally got to after tons of time persisting through Shopify’s useless AI bots) who told us over and over again that there’s no way to opt out of SHOP (even after we sent the screenshot of Shopify’s own support page telling merchants to contact support to opt our of SHOP), we finally got somebody who even knew what we were talking about…screenshot below. Good luck to fellow merchants trying to get help on this…our hearts go out to you.
Shopify should be ashamed of what it calls “support.”
And this dirty trick of ignoring merchants’ SHOP settings PLUS holding merchants’ products hostage by removing ALL agentic search results completely if merchants won’t be part of SHOP…well, it shows Shopify’s true colors: squeezing as much money as possible out of merchants.
More lies…it’s been over 48 hours and our products + pricing are still live on SHOP, despite support telling us in screenshot above it would take 24 hours.
We followed up (yet again) and their reply was “something hasn’t quite worked as hoped here, but we take the weekend off, so…”
Shopify gets to close cases after three days, and using the weekend while the clock ticks is a go-to move for Shopify support – we’ve experienced this multiple times and in spite of replies we make, follow ups we make, and more.
Way more than 72 hours, and shopity still isn’t sure all our products are removed from SHOP…we continue to follow up with them providing them screenshots and links of our products still on SHOP…
Yeah…removing products from ALL online search results isn’t a real world option (and we wrote about that already above). It’s a tricky move by Shopify: be part of our SHOP or else get erased from the entire internet. The idea that it’s a “solution” to have to be hidden from all online search results in order to do what Shopify admin settings pretend they’re doing (not making any products live on the SHOP channel and uninstalling SHOP channel) is just another way Shopify ransoms merchants’ products.
It’s bad enough that Shopify holds merchants’ products hostage by removing ALL agentic search results completely when merchants finally get through to a support rep who 1) doesn’t tell merchants that SHOP removal is impossible and 2) knows how to get to the mysterious “team” that will make the requested removal.
