The Log
Notes from catalog infrastructure in production. What broke, what we measured, and what the numbers actually say.
A return is a bug report. You pay the postage.
The most detailed product feedback your store will ever receive arrives in a cardboard box, and you pay the shipping on it. We treated returns like weather for years. Then we read the reason codes, and they read like a...
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...
Position 50 is where good products go to retire
Every catalog we open has one: a product that outsells everything around it, parked at position 50 of its own collection page. Nobody demoted it. It just got old.
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...
The product that doesn't exist
It's live. Priced and photographed, sitting on a perfectly good page. And nobody can find it. The dead inventory we keep finding in Shopify catalogs, and the instrument we built to catch it.