VarHide FAQs

VarHide automatically hides sold-out product variants from your storefront and brings them back when they're restocked. It works by unpublishing variants from your sales channels — so they disappear from product pages, storefront search, and collection filters together — rather than by editing your theme. The full story is on the VarHide page.

You never edit code. To hide unavailable variants on your Online Store storefront, you enable the VarHide app embed in the theme editor — a one-click toggle (the app links you straight to it). There are no Liquid edits, and storefront search, collection filters, and other channels are handled server-side at the channel level.

All of them — Dawn, paid themes, custom builds. The app embed handles the storefront variant picker (dropdowns, buttons, swatches) without any code changes, and channel-level unpublishing covers storefront search, collection filters, and other sales channels. If you switch themes, just flip the embed on in the new theme — still no code.

About five minutes: install, enable the app embed in your theme editor (one toggle), select the channels to manage, pick your sold-out definition, optionally add rules, and enable automatic updates. No developer needed.

Your choice of four definitions: the default available-for-sale check; only inventory at locations that fulfil online orders; inventory at specific locations you pick; or a custom threshold — e.g. treat 2 units or fewer as sold out.

Yes — set an inventory threshold and anything at or below it is treated as sold out. Useful when the last few units are safety stock or often unsellable.

Never. Variants are unpublished from your chosen channels, not removed from your store. SKUs, barcodes, prices, and order history stay intact in your admin — here's why that matters.

They're left visible by default — they're backorderable on purpose, so customers can still buy them. You can change this in settings if you want them hidden anyway.

Untracked variants are treated as always in stock and never hidden — there's no meaningful "sold out" state for them. Enable "Track quantity" on a variant if you want VarHide to manage it.

Yes. The query builder scopes hiding by product tag, vendor, product type, status, title, variant SKU, barcode, price — even metafields. A rule like "only products tagged clearance" makes hybrid strategies easy; everything outside your rules is left alone.

By default, VarHide keeps the product visible rather than leaving it with zero published variants — which would 404 the product page and hurt SEO (single-variant products included). You can disable this safeguard, or pair VarHide with Blink if you'd rather hide whole sold-out products.

With automatic updates enabled, it's republished to your configured channels — typically within a couple of minutes of the inventory change. Supplier deliveries, customer returns, corrections, and transfers all count. How republishing works in depth.

Only if you want it to. The "only republish what the app hid" mode restores just the variants VarHide itself hid, leaving your deliberate manual unpublishes untouched.

Yes. Before touching any variant, VarHide records its original publication state, and the restore action re-publishes every variant back to that recorded state in one click — including if you're uninstalling.

Real-time updates are driven by Shopify's inventory webhooks and typically reflect within a couple of minutes. A scheduled re-sync also runs as a safety net, catching anything a missed webhook could leave behind.

Yes — you select exactly which channels VarHide manages. A variant can be hidden on your Online Store while staying available at POS or on any unmanaged channel. How per-channel hiding works.

Yes. B2B company catalogs are managed on the Business plan ($9.99/mo) and Markets region catalogs on the Enterprise plan ($14.99/mo) — each independently, so wholesale and regional visibility can follow their own rules. Details here.

No — VarHide doesn't manage the POS channel at all, by design. POS visibility is always left intact, which is what retail operations need: in-store staff can see and sell everything in front of them, including the last shelf unit that online shoppers no longer see.

Hiding and publishing variants across all sales channels, the query builder, and manual updates — you trigger runs yourself. It's a real free plan, not a trial.

Premium ($4.99/mo or $49/yr) adds real-time automatic updates. Business ($9.99/mo or $99/yr) adds B2B catalog support. Enterprise ($14.99/mo or $149/yr) adds Markets region coverage. Paid plans include a 14-day free trial.

Plans don't gate by variant count — they differ by features (automation, B2B, Markets), not by catalogue size.

No — variants share their product's URL, so hiding one removes nothing from Google's index. The real risk is product pages that 404 when everything sells out, which VarHide's keep-product-visible default prevents. The full SEO analysis.

Hidden variants drop out of the page's Product schema and out of that channel's feed — keeping both truthful about what's actually purchasable, and back in automatically after restock republishing.

The usual causes, in order of likelihood: "Continue selling when out of stock" is on; inventory isn't tracked; the app is in manual mode; the channel isn't selected; your rules exclude the product; it's the all-variants-sold-out safeguard; the update hasn't propagated yet; or caching. Our nine-cause troubleshooting checklist walks through each with fixes.

Check that automatic updates are enabled (the free plan is manual), allow a couple of minutes for propagation, and confirm the variant clears your sold-out threshold if you use one. In "only republish what the app hid" mode, variants you unpublished yourself stay hidden by design.

Email support@xeonapp.com or reach us through the App Store listing. Including the product handle and the channel where you see the issue speeds everything up.