Shopify has rolled out a few updates this week - some of which are incremental in nature; some of which leave you - for lack of better words - scratching your head; and some of which are genuinely and quietly brilliant.

Our Technical Director, David Alexander, breaks down what's happening, and what it means for merchants using the platform:

Unlisted Product Status

The new “Unlisted” product status is handy for anyone needing test links or wanting to temporarily hide their products from public view. Applying this status to a product will keep it out of search engines, sitemaps, collections, recommendations, and predictive search. Sounds simple, right? But the reality is a bit messier.

Unlike the seo.hidden metafield, Unlisted products don’t automatically add noindex, nofollow, or robots.txt exclusions. They can still be accessed via direct links. In essence, it solves part of the visibility problem, just not all of it.

For now, the practical approach is: use Unlisted to hide products from customers, seo.hidden to hide them from search engines, and then use both if you want a product to be completely undiscoverable.

The bigger issue is arguably not even the feature itself - it’s actually Shopify’s vague wording. Terms like “hidden from search” or “won’t appear in Google” leave too much room for interpretation.

Merchants, digital teams and SEOs are left guessing as to what’s actually happening behind the scenes, and it’s as clear as day that a more transparent, unified visibility framework would go a long way.

Lovable x Shopify Partnership

Shopify’s new Lovable integration has caused a bit of a stir online too. We’ve seen some people downplay it massively, and others claim it’s a game-changer.

The reality? It’s clever, yes - but its usefulness is mostly limited to small, niche projects. Existing Shopify stores can’t easily benefit without starting a new store, and there’s still some back-end work required to get things running.

Using Lovable effectively also depends on one's prompt engineering skills. The AI can unquestionably produce outputs quickly, but if you don’t know what to ask, you’ll likely get frustrated with the results.

Cost is another unknown - the platform runs on a credit-based system, and there’s no clear way to estimate how much a project will use, which makes budgeting tricky.

In short, it’s promising, but again, only for a subset of merchants. Its bigger impact may appear later - perhaps if AI-assisted Shopify app fixes or micro-projects become a viable revenue stream.

2048 Product Variants

Shopify has also increased the product variant limit from 100 to 2,048. That’s a meaningful upgrade - especially for merchants who stayed on Magento because of variant limitations. 

However, with still only three options per product, the practical effects of this are limited - and even this change required a concerted effort behind the scenes to untangle decades-old code.

So while it’s a solid improvement, it doesn’t erase Shopify’s legacy constraints - at least yet.

Big stores will see the benefit, but it’s worth keeping perspective.

Metafield and Metaobject Upgrades: Quiet, But Hugely Impactful

The final update is one that’s flown under the radar somewhat: Shopify has quietly raised the limits for metafield and metaobject definitions.

While this doesn't sound glamorous or exciting, it's the change which may genuinely be the most meaningful for developers and complex stores.

In short, each app now gets its own allocation, meaning developers no longer have to worry about competing for definition space across integrations - which is huge.

Merchants benefit too, with far higher limits that better support multi-app workflows and large-scale custom data structures.

Here's a snippet of what’s changed:

• Each app can now create up to 128 metaobject definitions, while Plus and Enterprise merchants get up to 256.
• Metaobject entries have jumped from a 64,000 or 128,000 cap (depending on plan) to a massive 1,000,000 entries per definition.
• Metafield definitions have also increased to 256 per resource type for merchants and 128 per resource type for apps.

While none of these changes are anywhere near flashy enough to make headlines, they are unquestionably foundational in their nature - as they promise to remove not only some of the platform's constraints, but also some of the technical ceilings that had previously limited how far developers could push Spotify's customisation capabailities.

And so what does that mean for the platform? Larger catalogues, richer metadata, and more complex app ecosystems - simply to name a few.

While this particular brand of deep, unglamorous improvement rarely gets the level of coverage that a fancy logo redesign or the release of a new AI partnership would muster, it is arguably more important for the long-term health of the platform.

Shopify’s step forward

These updates show Shopify is moving forward, step by step - and that the innovation on the platform is considered, steady, and deliberate.

Shopify haven't reinvented the wheel - but it's finally greasing the right ones.