--- title: Matrixify Sales Channel Publishing: Limited to Online Store and POS date: 2026-05-15 description: Matrixify only publishes products to two Shopify sales channels — Online Store and Point of Sale — at the product level. Altera supports per-channel publishing for products, collections, and variants across every installed channel, including Hydrogen, Buy Button, GraphQL App, and marketplaces. url: https://www.getaltera.com/matrixify-sales-channel-publishing/ --- Matrixify supports sales channel publishing, but only in a very narrow way: **two channels (Online Store and Point of Sale), at the product level only**, controlled by the legacy `Published` and `Published Scope` columns. Every other channel a Shopify store can install — Shop, Hydrogen, Buy Button, the GraphQL Admin App, and marketplace channels like Facebook and Google — is outside what Matrixify can manage from a spreadsheet. **Altera** supports per-channel publishing across every installed channel and at every level of granularity — product, collection, and [variant](/matrixify-variant-sales-channel-publishing/) — using a Matrixify-compatible spreadsheet format. --- ## How Sales Channel Publishing Works in Shopify A Shopify store can install many sales channels. Each one is a separate surface where products appear. The defaults that ship with most stores: - **Online Store** — the storefront on `your-store.myshopify.com` or your custom domain - **Shop** — Shopify's consumer-facing app - **Point of Sale** — the in-store POS app - **Hydrogen / Headless** — custom storefronts built on Shopify's Hydrogen framework, which uses its own publication channel - **GraphQL Admin App** — used by headless storefronts and integrations that read products through the Admin API - **Buy Button** — embeddable buy buttons for external sites and blogs - **Marketplace channels** — Facebook & Instagram, Google & YouTube, TikTok, and any other channel installed from the Shopify App Store For every one of these channels, Shopify exposes a separate publication record per product. A product can be published to the Online Store and hidden from Shop, or visible in Hydrogen but not in the GraphQL App, or any other combination. --- ## What Matrixify Supports (and What It Doesn't) **Matrixify can:** - Toggle a product on or off the **Online Store** with `Published` (TRUE/FALSE) - Set `Published Scope` to `global` (Online Store + Point of Sale) or `web` (Online Store only) - Schedule a future publish date for the Online Store via `Published At` **Matrixify cannot:** - Publish or unpublish products on **Shop, Hydrogen, the GraphQL Admin App, Buy Button**, or any marketplace channel. Their docs are explicit: *"Changes to any other channels like Facebook, Wholesale, etc. are not available through this import."* - Manage sales channel publishing for **collections** — collections only get the same legacy `Published Scope` field. - Manage publishing for **individual variants** on any channel. Publication values are read *"only in the first row of each product"* — variant rows are ignored. If your store sells through anything beyond the Online Store and POS, Matrixify's publishing columns won't help you. You're back to clicking through the Shopify admin one product at a time. --- ## Where This Gap Hurts - **Headless storefronts.** If you've moved your storefront to Hydrogen or a custom GraphQL-driven build, you typically want some products live on Hydrogen but not on the legacy Online Store, or vice versa during a migration. Matrixify can't toggle the Hydrogen channel. - **Marketplace launches.** Pushing a curated subset of products to Facebook, Google, or TikTok in bulk means writing a spreadsheet with per-channel columns. Matrixify doesn't expose those. - **B2B and wholesale.** Wholesale-only products usually live behind a GraphQL App or a private channel. Matrixify can't gate visibility per channel. - **Buy Button embeds.** Selectively exposing products on Buy Button while keeping the rest off requires per-channel control Matrixify doesn't have. - **Multi-region rollouts.** Stores that stage launches by channel — Online Store first, marketplaces later — need a way to set publication state per channel in bulk. --- ## How Altera Handles Sales Channel Publishing Altera treats sales channel publishing as a first-class column set at three levels. ### Product Level For every channel installed on your store, Altera adds a `Published: ` column. `TRUE` publishes the product on that channel, `FALSE` unpublishes it, blank skips the update. | Handle | Published: Online Store | Published: Shop | Published: Hydrogen | Published: Buy Button | Published: GraphQL App | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | bench-00098 | TRUE | TRUE | TRUE | FALSE | TRUE | | crate-00045 | TRUE | FALSE | FALSE | FALSE | TRUE | The same column pattern works for any marketplace channel installed in your store — `Published: Facebook & Instagram`, `Published: Google & YouTube`, and so on. The legacy `Published` and `Published Scope` columns continue to work for stores that haven't migrated their spreadsheets; when both are present, the per-channel columns take priority. ### Collection Level Both Smart Collections and Manual Collections support the same `Published: ` columns. This is something Matrixify doesn't expose at all — collections in Matrixify only get the legacy `Published Scope` field. See the [collection sales channel publishing changelog](/changelog/2026-01-14-collection-sales-channel-publishing/) for the release notes. ### Variant Level For channels where Shopify allows per-variant visibility — Online Store, Shop, Hydrogen, Buy Button, GraphQL App, and marketplace channels — Altera adds parallel `Variant Published: ` columns. This lets you hide individual SKUs from a single channel without splitting the product. See the dedicated [variant sales channel publishing page](/matrixify-variant-sales-channel-publishing/) for the full column reference, examples, and use cases. (Point of Sale is the one channel where per-variant publishing doesn't apply — Shopify only allows POS visibility at the product level.) --- ## Frequently Asked Questions **Does Matrixify support sales channel publishing?** Only narrowly. It supports Online Store and Point of Sale at the product level, via the legacy `Published` and `Published Scope` columns. It doesn't support any other channel (Shop, Hydrogen, Buy Button, GraphQL App, Facebook, Google, etc.), it doesn't support collection-level per-channel publishing, and it doesn't support per-variant publishing on any channel. **Which channels does Altera support?** Every sales channel installed on your store. Altera generates a `Published: ` column for each one, plus a parallel `Variant Published: ` column for the channels where Shopify allows per-variant visibility. **Can I bulk-publish products to a Hydrogen storefront with Altera?** Yes. Hydrogen is a regular sales channel in Shopify, so it exports and imports through `Published: Hydrogen` (and `Variant Published: Hydrogen` for per-variant control). Matrixify does not support this. **What about marketplace channels like Facebook or Google?** Altera reads every installed channel from your store and generates a column for each. If you have Facebook & Instagram installed, the export includes `Published: Facebook & Instagram`. Matrixify only supports Online Store and POS, regardless of what marketplace channels you've installed. **Can I use Altera's sales channel publishing with Matrixify for everything else?** Yes. Altera uses the same Matrixify-compatible spreadsheet format. You can use Matrixify for data types it supports and Altera for sales channel publishing, [variant-level publishing](/matrixify-variant-sales-channel-publishing/), [market translations](/matrixify-translations/), [metafield definitions](/matrixify-metafield-definitions/), [metaobject definitions](/matrixify-metaobject-definitions/), [inventory transfers](/matrixify-inventory-transfers/), [linked product options](/matrixify-linked-product-options/), and other data types Matrixify doesn't cover. --- See our full [Altera vs. Matrixify comparison](/altera-vs-matrixify/) for a breakdown of all the differences between the two tools, or check the [FAQ](/shopify-import-export-matrixify-faq/) for more common questions. {{< comparison-cta text="Publish products, collections, and variants to specific sales channels with Altera." >}}