All articles
Browse practical Shopify app guides, beginning with the newest.
Shopify Shipped Native A/B Testing in 2026 — And Then Hid Revenue From the Results
"Shopify has no native A/B testing" stopped being true on March 31, 2026. Experiments live in Markets > Rollouts. But experiments need the Grow plan, the only testable resources are your main theme and your checkout configuration, and switching a rollout from launch to experiment strips gross sales, AOV, and order count out of the results — leaving exactly four metrics you can't customize. Here's what Rollouts covers, why Shopify's own docs say anti-flicker snippets cost 2+ seconds of FCP, and how ten real A/B testing apps price themselves on five different denominators. Researched September 1, 2026.
Shopify Schedule Sale: Why Your Sale Starts on Time but Never Ends on Its Own
Most Shopify merchants still start and end sales by hand at midnight. Native Future publishing can only schedule a product to go live; there is no documented way to schedule it to go back to unpublished. Theme scheduling became a native Basic-and-up feature with Rollouts in June 2026, so unless you run a Vintage theme you no longer need a theme scheduler app. Shopify Flow has no price-change action at all. Launchpad is Plus-only, rated 2.6, and one of its headline features stopped working when Scripts were retired. We compare four alternatives on pricing and rollback behavior. Researched September 1, 2026.
Shopify Self-Serve Returns Can't Request an Exchange — And Return Fees Aren't Deducted Automatically
Shopify's native returns are free, but the Help Center states plainly that exchanges can't be requested through self-serve returns and that you can't create exchange-specific return rules. Return fees are displayed but never deducted from refunds automatically. Final sale exceptions accept products or collections — not both. Here's the exact boundary, plus how Return Prime, Yanet Returns & Exchanges, and two Japan-only apps bill on request volume rather than orders. Researched September 1, 2026.
Shopify Rewrites Your Sender Address If You Don't Meet Five Conditions — Not Four
If your order confirmations arrive from [email protected] instead of your own domain, that's not a bug — Shopify rewrote it. The usual advice is 'add the CNAME records.' That's incomplete. Shopify's automatic authentication explicitly does not create a DMARC record, two DMARC records fail validation outright, adkim=s breaks alignment, deleting the CNAMEs silently resets you, and email forwarding requires the SPF TXT record Shopify otherwise tells you not to add. All five failure modes, verified against Shopify's own documentation. Researched September 1, 2026.
Shopify Sells Shipping Labels in Exactly Eight Countries. Outside Them, the App Category Looks Completely Different.
The Shopify Help Center page on buying shipping labels contains a carrier table. Its rows are the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. That is the whole list. Japan is not on it, and neither is most of the world. Using Japan as the worked example, here is why shipping apps outside those eight countries are built around CSV export rather than label purchase, how seven real apps split into label-issuing and CSV-exporting types, and why their pricing is quoted per export batch rather than per monthly order. Researched September 1, 2026.
Shopify Caps Custom Shipping Profiles at 99 — But the Real Problem Is That Splitting Profiles Adds Up the Rates
Shopify documents a hard limit of 99 custom shipping profiles. In practice, though, the count isn't what breaks first — it's what happens when products from different profiles land in the same cart. Shopify states plainly that identically named rates are added together, and that differently named rates get reduced to the cheapest from each profile, summed, and shown as a single option called "Shipping." The more you split, the more you charge. And reading the one-star reviews on shipping apps, the common denominator isn't missing features — it's the Carrier Calculated Shipping plan requirement. Here's what native shipping settings do and don't handle, plus eight shipping apps compared on CCS dependency, pricing, and condition types. All verified September 1, 2026.
Sidekick Can Build You an App — But Only on Grow and Above, and It Can't Reach Your Storefront
App generation is the one Sidekick feature the Help Center gates by plan — the requirement sits above the first paragraph: Grow, Advanced, and Plus only. And a generated app reaches exactly six Admin API surfaces, is invisible to customers, and can't touch themes, checkout, or customer account apps. Memory holds conversations about 3 months and admin activity about 12 hours. Customer support is explicitly out of scope. Where Sidekick replaces an automation app, and where it doesn't. Researched September 1, 2026.
Shopify Has No Size Chart Feature — But Its Help Center Publishes a Way to Build One Without an App
Shopify ships nothing called a size guide. But the help center does publish "Adding a pop-up size chart to your product pages" — a four-step method using a page-reference metafield and a theme pop-up block, no app required. The catch is a documented constraint: you can link exactly one page per product metafield. The moment your size charts differ by product, that method stops scaling. Here's why no table metafield type exists, where the line for adding an app actually sits, and six size chart apps compared on pricing, free-plan chart limits, watermarks, and order-volume surcharges. All verified September 1, 2026.