The Log
Notes from catalog infrastructure in production. What broke, what we measured, and what the numbers actually say.
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.
The $45,000 answer to 'should we just buy a PIM'
It's the same meeting every time. The catalog outgrows the team, someone says the word 'PIM,' and the room relaxes. Then someone opens the price list.
One second, half your transactions: what a slow storefront actually costs
A slow storefront never throws an error. Nothing crashes, nothing pages anyone, and the money leaves anyway. Two decades of measurement put a price on every 100 milliseconds.
Your sync didn't crash. It hit a bucket of 40.
A catalog sync dies quietly. No stack trace, no alert. The dashboard just stops moving. We blamed our own code, and the code was fine. Notes on REST, GraphQL, and Bulk Ops, learned the slow way.