Lintdog A catalog check for Shopify

Nobody owns your product catalog.
So it rots.

Paste any Shopify store. See what your customers are seeing.

No login, no install, nothing to authorise. Reads only what your storefront already publishes.

You have someone for ads, someone for the theme, someone for email. Nothing owns the product data all three of them read from. It accumulates other people's markup, loses its shipping weights, and drifts. Nothing checks it before customers see it.

By year the product was created

Every bar is live right now. Nothing here was cleaned up. The oldest defect we found had been sitting on a published product page since 2018 — 8.3 years.

Volume doesn't explain the shape. Between 2024 and 2026 the number of products created grew 1.6×. The number carrying markup grew 4.9×.

The bottom rows are the proof that products get rewritten in place.

Notefrom the
author

I run a small direct-trade tea and spice brand. One afternoon I found a tea in my own store with a shipping weight of 225 pounds. A hundred kilos. A seventy-dollar box of loose leaf. It had been live for months. Nobody had noticed, including me.

So I wrote something to read my catalogue properly, then ran it across 633 stores to find out whether I was unusual. I wasn't. Fewer than a fifth came back clean.

Along the way it turned out you can date the damage. Markup from Word, Slack, Wix, Google Sheets and now the AI chat tools gets pasted into product descriptions and stays there. It hides behind a page that still looks normal, so nobody catches it. The oldest one I found had been live since 2018.

— Arun, Living Roots USA

Survey633 stores
246,844
products

Fewer than one catalog in five comes back clean.

Stores carrying at least one live defect81%
Expensive products with almost no description43%
Product photos too small to render sharply36%
Serving ChatGPT or Claude markup to customers1 in 3
Hero images in more than one shape25%
Colour variants with no photo of their own22%
Tags spelled more than one way19%
Word markup still embedded in descriptions1 in 4
Catalogs that lost their shipping weights halfway12%
Longest a defect had been sitting live, undetected8.3 yrs
The tool

Two halves. The scan is free and needs no install. It reads only what your storefront already publishes.

For the repair, you pick how it lands: a bulk-edit CSV you import yourself, a list of exact edits for your admin, or temporary write access so I do it. The first two need no permissions at all. Either way you see every diff before anything changes.

It strips the foreign markup without altering a single word of your copy. Verified word for word, not by eye.

Here is one of mine, before and after. Same words, both times.

Before · 2,652 characters
<div data-test-render-count="1"><div class="group">
<div class="contents"><div data-is-streaming="false"
class="group relative pb-3"><div class="font-claude-response
relative leading-[1.65rem]"><div><div class="standard-markdown
grid-cols-1 grid gap-3">
  <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words
  whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Some teas stand on their
  own. These three are better together</p>
After · 1,470 characters
<p>Some teas stand on their own. These three are
better together</p>

That was 22 products in about twenty minutes. Descriptions came out 40–75% smaller and read identically on the page.

That's one of three things it checks:

Product data
Shipping weights that can't be right, prices at zero, identifiers used twice, bundles with no description.
Presentation
Photos too small to render sharply, hero images that crop badly in your own grid, colour variants a shopper can't see, foreign markup.
Consistency
Tags spelled three ways so products fall out of their own collections, option names split in two, URLs that name a product you no longer sell.

It does not claim to lift your conversion rate. I looked for that and couldn't prove it, so I'm not going to say it.

Consequence

Your catalog is not just your admin.

The same product data is reused across your storefront, your collections, your shopping feeds, your campaigns and your fulfilment systems. A defect introduced once can travel through all of them.

And a product with broken data stays live. It still ranks. It still gets advertised. It still gets bought.

It also compounds. Among stores with fewer than 50 products, 55% had something wrong. Among stores with more than 500, it was 98%.

A wrong shipping weight
understate it and you absorb the carrier adjustment. Overstate it and the customer sees an inflated quote.
Colour variant with no photo
a colour bought sight unseen, then returned.
No description on a $200 bundle
the highest-value product explains nothing.
One tag spelled three ways
the product isn't in its own collection.

Catalog mistakes are common. The question is who finds them first: your team, or your customer.

Agencies

Agencies inherit these by the portfolio.

The scan needs no install, so an entire client list can be read at once. Send me the client list you already publish. I'll scan every storefront on it and send back a QA report across the portfolio, then fix the first ten defects on any one of them, free, so you can see what a fix looks like before anyone touches a live store.

arun@lintdog.com