The Log
Notes from catalog infrastructure in production. What broke, what we measured, and what the numbers actually say.
Wholesale is a second catalog. Nobody staffs it.
Turn on Shopify B2B and nothing looks different. Same products, same admin, same dashboard. But behind the login there is now a second catalog, with its own prices and its own rules, and nobody's name on it.
The search box became a chatbot, and it has never heard of you
Ask ChatGPT to recommend the kind of product you sell. It names three brands, none of them yours. The store ranks on Google, the reviews are real, and the machine cannot read you. Notes on what answer engines actually eat.
642,000 SKUs later, every catalog has the same seven problems
Every store believes its catalog is a unique mess. We believed it too, for the first few projects. Then the field notes started photocopying themselves: the same seven problems, in every catalog we opened.
One catalog, five countries, and a number that stops being true
Turn on a new market and the admin doesn't blink. Same product list, same counts. Everything just got bigger except the number. Notes on what Markets actually multiplies.
The new buyer never sees your homepage. It can already check out.
On September 29, 2025, ChatGPT got a checkout button. We filed it under demo-ware. Then Shopify rebuilt its platform around buyers that read structured data, and catalog quality stopped being an SEO chore.
The fastest way to audit an app is to take it away
The fastest way to find out what an app does for your storefront is to take it away. Block one script, reload the page, and whatever breaks was its job. Field notes on the audit method that ends with firings.
Nobody typed 'shorts'. Search found them anyway.
A shopper types 'something to wear in the summer' into a Shopify search bar and gets shorts, a product the query never names. Notes on the engine swap underneath storefront search, and what it reads in your catalog.
The platform made $1.5 billion. The layer above it made $6.9 billion.
There is a line in Shopify's Spring '26 Editions that reads like our obituary. Shopify Catalog now standardizes and enriches product data automatically, and that is most of what we do all day. So why are we expanding?
Your oldest app still thinks a product has 100 variants
Every Shopify admin is a museum. Some apps on your Apps page stopped evolving in 2024, nothing on the screen tells you which, and the variant ceiling just moved to 2,048.