A place where the store sells, such as the Online Store, the Shop app, Instagram or a headless site; a product or a collection shows up in a channel only when it is published to it.
One Shopify store can sell in many places at once: its own theme (the Online Store), shops in person (Point of Sale), the Shop app, Facebook and Instagram, Google, marketplaces, and headless storefronts such as a Webflow site. Each place is a sales channel.
Products and collections are published to the channels where they should appear. On a product page in Shopify, the Publishing card lists them. A product published to the Online Store but not to your headless storefront is on Shopify’s own site and missing from yours.
This is the first thing to check when a product does not appear:
Published to the Headless channel
- On the site
- The product loads.
- In the CMS
- The sync imports it.
Not published there
- On the site
- The product does not load.
- In the CMS
- The sync does not import it. The import finds collections through their products, so a collection without published products is not imported either.
The channel also shows in every order, so you know where each sale came from.
In Webflow terms
Think of a channel as a site a product can be published to, like publishing a Webflow site to its staging address or to its custom domain. Publishing to one does not publish to the others.
In Smootify
Your Smootify project reads the Headless storefront you created in Shopify: every product and collection you sell must be published to its channel, in the markets you sell in. The CMS sync imports only those, and a product page of one that is missing shows nothing.
More in Set up the Shopify store.