The Log
Notes from catalog infrastructure in production. What broke, what we measured, and what the numbers actually say.
Sidekick answered everything we asked. That was the problem.
We went in hoping to be smug about the platform's free AI. It kept answering. What we found instead was the one question an assistant is never asked.
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.
The $90,000 line item nobody has ever added up
Ask a brand what their catalog operation costs and you get a pause. Not a number, a pause. So we built the price tag ourselves, and the villain was not the one we expected.
The catalog data that doesn't survive the uninstall
Every catalog we open, we run the same test: uninstall every app, on paper, and count what survives. The products survive. The size charts usually don't.
The limit moved. The wall didn't.
For years, the most expensive number in Shopify commerce was 100. In April 2024 it became 2,048, and almost everyone assumed the variant problem was over. We watched the new ceiling from inside 28 client catalogs. The limit moved. The...
We replaced 7 apps with 200 lines of Liquid
A storefront never gets slow all at once. It gets slow one Tuesday at a time, one install at a time, until the page is carrying a tax nobody ever itemized. This is the log entry where we added it...
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.