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Browse practical Shopify app guides, beginning with the newest.
Shopify Publishes Two Different POS Payment Country Lists — 18 in One Place, 15 in Another
Shopify POS runs almost everywhere. Shopify Payments for POS does not. Shopify's own documentation lists the supported countries twice and the two lists don't match — 18 countries on the setup page, 15 in the feature comparison table. If your country is outside both, POS Pro at $89/location/month still bills you for features that assume integrated card readers you can't get. Here is the complete list of what Pro adds, which of those 20 rows survive without Shopify Payments, the 20 free Pro locations bundled into every Plus plan, and the 7-day refund window most merchants miss. Researched September 1, 2026.
250 Media Per Product Is a Hard Ceiling on Shopify — Plus a Weekly 1,000-Video Cap and Deletions You Can't Undo
Variants went up to 2,048. Product media stayed at 250 — images, videos, and 3D models combined — and Shopify's own troubleshooting page says flatly that this limit can't be raised. Videos carry three more limits that stack on top of it: a store-wide count that starts at 250 on Basic, a separate 50 GB video storage pool, and a 1,000-video-per-week upload cap that applies on every plan including Plus. Deleted videos are gone permanently, and removing media from a product frees no storage at all. Here's what Shopify documents, plus six shoppable video apps compared on the axis that decides your bill: views versus uploads. Researched September 1, 2026.
Shopify's Product-Description Recommendation Strategy Is English-Storefront Only — And Complementary Products Are Never Auto-Generated
Shopify auto-generates related products using three strategies, and the help center states plainly that one of them — product description — is available only to merchants with an English storefront. Complementary products, the "frequently bought together" slot, aren't auto-generated at all: you pick them by hand, ten per product, one product at a time. There are six display conditions, one of which is that the product isn't currently in the visitor's cart. Here's the native boundary and what three recommendation apps actually charge for. Researched September 1, 2026.
Shopify Product Recommendations Work Without an App | The 10-Item Limit, Japan's Missing Algorithm, and Four Reasons to Add an App
Shopify product recommendations work without an app, but the native API returns at most 10 items, supports only two intent values, does not generate cross-sells automatically, and omits one of three algorithms for Japanese stores. This article maps those limits and the four points where a paid recommendation app becomes worthwhile. Researched September 1, 2026.
Shopify Protect Covers Exactly Two Chargeback Reason Codes — And Shopify's Help Page and Terms Don't Agree on Which Carriers Qualify
Shopify Protect is free, and if you're a US store on Shop Pay you probably have it on. What it actually covers is narrower than most merchants assume: two chargeback reason codes, physical goods only, shipped within 7 days on a supported carrier — and the help center lists 13 supported carriers while the Terms of Service define only 5. Outside those lines, the tools that matter are 3D Secure liability shift, manual capture, and Flow. Plus: the native Fraud Filter app is gone, the Order Risk API is deprecated, and Shopify's own Fraud Control app sits at 2.4 stars. Researched September 1, 2026. Not legal advice.
Shopify Protect Is Free — And Six Ordinary Things You Do Every Day Silently Void It
Shopify Protect reimburses fraud chargebacks at no cost, but the Help Center lists a stack of conditions that most merchants never read. One digital item in the cart voids the order. Fixing a customer's shipping address after checkout voids it. Shipping with a carrier outside the supported list of 13 voids it. Shop Pay Installments is excluded. Subscriptions are covered on the first order only. And if you're on Basic without Shopify Payments, fraud analysis gives you indicators but no risk recommendation at all. Here is the exact boundary, plus three fraud apps compared on the same axes. Researched September 1, 2026.
Shopify Cannot Generate Return Labels for Japanese Stores | Native Return Limits and Six Apps Compared
Shopify's native self-serve returns are free, but Shopify-generated return labels require both the shipping origin and destination to be in the U.S., customers cannot request exchanges, and return fees are not automatically deducted from refunds. This article maps those limits and compares six return apps priced by monthly request volume. Researched September 1, 2026.
Shopify robots.txt: Following the Official Docs Silently Rolls You Back to an Older Ruleset — Verified Across 6 Live Stores
Shopify robots.txt is editable through a robots.txt.liquid template. The catch: as of September 1, 2026, the officially recommended `robots.default_groups` object returns an older ruleset than the default Shopify actually serves. We pulled the live /robots.txt from 6 real stores and compared them. The moment you create the template, /search and /policies/ get newly blocked, and the AI-agent header comments plus the entire block of Allow rules disappear. The sitemap.xml served by the Online Store cannot be customized at all — the only two exclusion methods are the seo.hidden metafield and the Unlisted product status. We also checked the App Store feature tags on 5 major SEO apps to see how many can touch robots.txt at all.