Shopify Sales Channels: Which to Add and How to Publish

Adding a sales channel is a short install; what decides whether it helps you happens around it. The moment you install one, every product you already have becomes available to it, and the channel then applies its own rules to what you send.

This guide covers the four moves around that install: checking whether your store qualifies, adding the channel, publishing products to it, and removing it.

What Is a Sales Channel in Shopify?

In Shopify's own terms, connecting sales channels to your store lets you manage your products, orders and more from your Shopify admin, and you can use a single channel or several. Every channel follows the same pattern: you add it, you decide which products it gets, and the channel then applies its own rules to what you send it. The sections below follow that order.

One detail confuses merchants the first time. Many channels come from the Shopify App Store, yet they never appear on your Apps page afterwards:

Where channels live in your admin

Once installed, a channel appears under Sales channels in the navigation sidebar of your admin in a web browser. Settings > Sales channels lists the channels you've added, and it's where you add more.

What the channel decides on its own

Publishing a product to a channel puts it under a second set of rules. Three things follow from that:

• Listing and shipping rules. Some sales channels require or prohibit certain information in your product listings, and some require you to ship orders within a specific timeframe.
• Support. If you need help with a third-party sales channel, Shopify's Help Center tells you to contact the app developer directly.
• Refusals. Each channel can refuse a published product; see where each channel shows its verdict.

Which Sales Channels Can You Add?

Shopify's sales channels overview doesn't give one long list. It sorts channels by type, saying that adding sales channels lets you meet shoppers where they're already browsing. The table follows that grouping: the middle column names the channels each Help Center section lists, and the third-party row gives one example from the Shopify App Store.

Can Your Store Use the Channel? Requirements by Channel

Shopify's features-on-all-plans page ties eligibility for each sales channel to your plan as well as other requirements. No Help Center page we have found sets a number of channels per plan (see the search boundary at the end of the removal section); what varies is each channel's own entry conditions.

Where to check: a channel your store can't use shows as Unavailable in your admin. For Shop, after you change your store to meet the requirements, the approval status can take up to 48 hours to update.

Facebook & Instagram: two official answers on the plan

The plan question has two official answers. Shopify's Facebook and Instagram by Meta page, read October 14, 2026, says the channel is free to use with all Shopify plans, subject to store eligibility. Meta's Business Help Center, also read October 14, 2026, lists the Basic Shopify plan or higher among its requirements.

Your admin settles it for your store: if the channel shows as Unavailable, the store doesn't meet its requirements. If it installs, Meta's commerce account review is the next step, and Meta says that review can take up to 4 weeks.

How to Add a Sales Channel

On a computer, adding a channel takes four steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Sales channels.
2. Open the Shopify App Store from that page.
3. Search for the channel you want.
4. Click Install.

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In the Shopify mobile app, the same steps start from Settings > Sales channels.

What changes the moment a channel is installed

The step that catches merchants out happens as soon as the install finishes. Shopify states it without conditions:

So the real decision comes before you click Install. To keep a product off a channel, remove that channel from the product's availability, the same Publishing setting covered in the publishing section.

Two kinds of channel behave differently. The Shop channel is added to your admin automatically when your store meets the Shop Merchant Guidelines. Agentic storefronts such as ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot need nothing installed: they are active by default for eligible stores and managed in the Agentic storefronts section of Settings > Sales channels. Shopify notes that Google AI Mode and Gemini is rolling out to eligible stores.

Who on your team can add or remove channels

Channel access is a store permission. A user with the Manage and install apps and channels permission can add, access or delete apps and channels, provided their permissions match the ones each app or channel requires. If you check specific apps and sales channels in a role instead, the user can access only those, and Shopify says they can't install or delete apps. Point of Sale is the exception: access to it is managed through Point of Sale roles, not store permissions.

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How to Publish Products to a Sales Channel

Installing a channel opens the door. What the channel shows is decided product by product, variant by variant and collection by collection, and then the channel runs its own review.

One product: its Publishing section

Shopify puts the switch on the product itself: you control where you're selling a product by including it in your active sales channels.

1. In your admin, go to Products and open the product.
2. Click Manage publishing to adjust the product's channels.
3. Select the channels the product should sell on, clear the rest, and click Done.
4. Click Save.

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Excluding a product from a channel hides it from that channel. Shop is the exception: a product excluded from the Shop channel might still be displayed in Shop, with customers redirected to your online store to make a purchase.

Duplicates inherit the setting: if you duplicate a product and set the copy to Active, it publishes automatically to the same sales channels as the original. Point of Sale is a channel too, and when a product is missing from the POS app, our POS missing-product answer walks through the checks.

Variants have to be published too

Publishing has a second layer below the product. Shopify's variant publishing page says that for a variant to be displayed in a sales channel or catalog, both the parent product and the variant must be published to that channel or catalog. If every variant is unpublished from a channel, the parent product is entirely hidden there until you republish at least one variant.

That is why a product's Active status proves little on its own: Active is a product status, not a channel publication. When a product is Active but missing from a channel, start with our answer on products that don't show on a sales channel.

Collections are published separately

Collections have their own availability setting, and three rules come with it:

• Products keep their own settings. Changing a collection's availability doesn't change the availability of the individual products in it.
• Menus are separate. Making a collection visible to the Online Store doesn't automatically link it to your store's menus.
• Dates work on the Online Store. You can set a specific publishing date for a collection to be displayed in your online store, from the calendar in its Online Store row.

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Many products at once, and products you add later

For many products, the Help Center points to a bulk action: select the products in your Products list and set their availability by sales channel in one move instead of opening each product.

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New products are a separate question. Shopify's developer documentation describes a publication setting, autoPublish, under which products are published automatically when they're created; that is a field on a publication in the Admin API. In the admin, the product details page describes the default: every sales channel and market starts selected in a product's Publishing section. Open that section for each product you add and clear the channels it shouldn't sell on before you set it Active.

Published is not the same as approved

This is the second gate, and it sits on the channel's side. Each channel judges published products against its own rules and shows the result in its own place:

On its Misrepresentation policy page, Google says account reviews typically take 7 business days, but may take longer for complex reviews.

Different catalogs or prices per channel

Catalogs and prices per channel are a separate layer, set with channel markets, and one of its rules reaches publishing: products in a channel market must also be published to the sales channel to be displayed, and for traffic-generating channels such as Google and Facebook they must be published to your online store at the same price. Our guide explains why traffic-generating channels can't take a different price.

Before and After You Add a Channel

The checklist puts this guide in launch order. Step two decides what the channel gets, because the install makes your whole catalog available to it.

What Happens When You Remove a Sales Channel?

Uninstalling is also Shopify's advice for a sales channel that becomes unsupported: contact the developer and ask them to update their channel, and if you can't reach the developer, uninstall it.

How to uninstall a channel

1. Go to Settings > Sales channels.
2. Open the menu (⋯) beside the channel.
3. Click Uninstall.
4. Confirm in the dialog that opens.

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Shopify's page on managing sales channels describes this confirmation as selecting I understand the risks of uninstalling this sales channel. The Pinterest and Facebook & Instagram dialogs we opened on October 14, 2026 asked for a reason for uninstalling instead, with an Uninstall button to confirm. The steps are the same in the Shopify mobile app.

Whichever form the confirmation takes, it is where the general steps stop; what uninstalling changes depends on the channel. Shopify's Buy Button FAQ says to fulfill all Buy Button orders and process any returns or refunds before uninstalling; after uninstalling, you won't be able to publish Buy Button products, fulfill or process orders, or measure performance. If you supply products through Shopify Collective, uninstalling it breaks all your retailer connections immediately, stops new Collective orders, and cancels unfulfilled orders with refunds to your retailers.

For Google & YouTube, Facebook & Instagram, TikTok Shop and Marketplace Connect, the Help Center pages we read on October 14, 2026 don't describe what uninstalling does to listings, ads or data (see the search boundary below), so read that channel's own help on disconnecting before you uninstall it.

What stays visible after you remove or unpublish

What the Help Center does describe is spread across several channel pages, from Shop's setup page to the agentic storefronts settings. Side by side:

Shop is the channel where removing and disappearing are furthest apart. You can hide individual products, but not the whole store:

So for Shop the lever is the product, not the channel. Unpublishing a product from Shop doesn't stop it displaying there, as the table above shows, and a product excluded from the Shop channel might still be displayed there. Hide the products that shouldn't be listed, as the Shop products page quoted above allows, instead of counting on an uninstall.

The Bottom Line

Shopify makes adding a channel a few clicks. The work that decides whether a channel helps you sits on either side of those clicks: the conditions you meet before, and the publishing and review after.

Frequently Asked Questions