#BlinkTank: Shopify just opened B2B to every plan
Hi everyone,
Two things before we get into the news.
First - we're finalists at the National Digital Awards for Best SEO Agency. The ceremony is on 22nd May and voting is open now if you'd like to support us: nationaldigitalawards.co.uk/vote-now.
I'll be honest: we've never really been an awards agency. But the team behind the NDAs have built something that feels genuinely different, and we're pleased to be in consideration.
Second - on Thursday 30th April, Blink is co-hosting an ecommerce dinner in York with Say Yes & Partners. Heur, Athos Commerce, and Lakeland Leather are joining us at Sora on the rooftop at Malmaison, 7pm to 10pm. If you're a brand based anywhere near York and want a seat, reply to this email. Numbers are limited.
Right. On to the news and stuff.
Shopify opens B2B to all plans
This is the big story of the week. Shopify has extended its core B2B features - company profiles, up to three custom catalogues with tailored pricing, volume discounts, quantity rules, payment terms, and vaulted credit cards - to merchants on Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans at no extra cost.
Previously all of this required Shopify Plus at £1,700 a month or more. Now it doesn't.
The nuance getting lost in most of the coverage: this is not everything. Plus merchants retain unlimited catalogues, direct catalogue assignment to companies and locations, partial payments, and deposits. The free tier is a meaningful start, not a replacement for Plus if B2B is a serious proportion of revenue.
Jason Greenwood made a good point on LinkedIn that is worth highlighting: the risk for Shopify is that merchants look more carefully at what's available on non-Plus plans, realise it still doesn't cover everything they need, and start evaluating dedicated B2B platforms instead. It is a calculated bet - bring merchants into the B2B ecosystem at a lower barrier, then convert them to Plus as complexity grows. Some will look elsewhere once they understand the limitations.
For large-catalogue merchants the most immediately interesting implication is catalogue management. Three custom catalogues - trade, wholesale, retail - is a reasonable starting point for testing a wholesale channel without a huge amount of extra work. If you've been putting off a B2B push because it felt like a Shopify Plus conversation, it isn't any more.
🔗 Shopify changelog: key B2B features now available on non-Plus plans
Search Console has been over-reporting impressions since May 2025
Google confirmed this week that a logging error has caused Search Console to over-report impressions since 13 May 2025. Clicks and other metrics were not affected. The fix is rolling out now, and as it does, reported impressions will fall.
This is worth flagging before the drop happens rather than after. If you see impressions declining in your Search Console performance report over the coming weeks, that is the correction taking effect - not a change in your actual visibility.
Our position right now is that it is hard to draw any firm conclusions until the correction completes and a new baseline is established. Google has not said how much figures were inflated, and - perhaps more importantly - it has not said which page types were affected. If the inflation was concentrated in blog and informational content, the commercial impact for most merchants is probably minimal. If it turns out impressions for product and collection pages were affected, that is a different story - those are the pages where impression-to-click ratios actually matter for planning and reporting.
Clicks were not affected by this bug. But it is worth noting that GSC click data has its own well-documented limitations - Google withholds query data for privacy reasons, and click counts are themselves an undercount of the full organic picture. The impression bug adds one more layer to an already complex data environment, which connects to something we will come back to later in this newsletter.
What should you do? Honestly - wait. Watch for when your impression data stabilises, note the new baseline, and treat the trend from that point as your starting reference rather than anything from the past eleven months.
🔗 Search Engine Land: Google is fixing a Search Console bug that inflated impression counts
Why agentic commerce is still mostly in the discovery phase
The Logic published a useful reality check on the agentic storefronts rollout this week. Harley Finkelstein said at a recent conference that approximately a dozen merchants were using the technology before Shopify opened it to everyone. Orders via AI chatbots have grown 15x since January 2025 - but the base is effectively zero, so the multiple looks impressive and the absolute number does not.
Dan Romanoff at Morningstar probably has the most honest opinion on where things sit: "It's more in the discovery phase than the transaction phase." Kurt Elster at Ethercycle is seeing ChatGPT referral traffic convert at a higher rate than other sources on the stores he manages - an interesting early signal, but one practitioner's experience rather than a trend.
The 4% OpenAI transaction fee that caused anxiety in January is gone. OpenAI shelved in-chat checkout in favour of an in-app browser - meaning a user finds your product in ChatGPT and completes the purchase in a browser overlay. That is a meaningfully different experience from a true in-chat transaction, and it probably explains the slow uptake. The friction hasn't been removed; it has just moved.
Romanoff's five-year prediction: AI responsible for up to 10% of Shopify's GMV-derived fee revenue by 2031. Which implies roughly 90% of revenue still flowing through traditional search and direct channels for the foreseeable future. Not an argument for ignoring agentic commerce - an argument for not reorganising around it while the infrastructure is still being built.
Our opinion hasn't changed. Catalogue quality and taxonomy are the infrastructure that determines whether agentic commerce works for your store when it does mature. That work is worth doing now regardless of how quickly AI shopping adoption moves.
🔗 The Logic: Shopify opened the AI shopping floodgates. So far, not much has happened.
Why this FTC crackdown matters more than it looks
Lily Ray flagged something this week that deserves more attention than it's getting in the SEO press. FTC rules that came into effect in October 2024 formally prohibit businesses from publishing self-promotional "best of" lists that rank their own products or services at the top, particularly where those lists include fabricated reviews of competitors whose products were never used. Penalties run to $51,744 per violation.
I'll be honest: this is something I've wanted to see for a long time. "Best of" and roundup content has been one of the most abused formats in digital marketing for years - and it's got significantly worse since AI made it trivially easy to produce. The number of "top 10 Shopify SEO agencies" articles that exist purely to rank the publishing agency first, written by people who have never used any of the services they're reviewing, is remarkable. It's noise dressed as editorial, and it wastes everyone's time.
This matters for merchants in two specific ways. First, if you run any affiliate or comparison content featuring your own products - directly or through agency relationships - it is worth a compliance review. Second, if you appear on third-party review aggregators or comparison sites, it is worth understanding how those rankings are determined and whether the site's model is compliant.
The rule does not prohibit featuring your own products in editorial content. It prohibits misrepresenting the basis for the ranking, fabricating competitor reviews, and presenting paid placements as organic recommendations. Primarily a US rule, but UK merchants with US customers are not entirely outside its reach.
🔗 FTC: Consumer reviews and testimonials rule
The data quality problem nobody is talking about clearly enough
The Search Console bug is the most visible example of a data reliability issue affecting Shopify merchants right now, but it is not the only one.
GA4's consent mode implementation means that for non-consenting users - a significant proportion of UK and EU traffic - sessions either go unrecorded or land as direct, stripping organic attribution in the process. Shopify session data is being inflated by bot traffic in ways that weren't easy to see until Shopify introduced its human-or-bot filter in October 2025 - which only applies to data going forward, not retroactively. And now Search Console impressions have been wrong for eleven months.
The combined effect is that telling a clean, coherent story about channel performance is genuinely difficult right now. Budget decisions are being made from data that doesn't accurately reflect what each channel is doing. Organic tends to lose out most. GA4 may be showing organic revenue at under 10% of total - when for a well-run large-catalogue Shopify store, 20% or more would be a reasonable expectation.
One approach we've found more reliable in this environment: looking at the relationship between non-brand clicks from Search Console - filtered to commercial pages, with blog content excluded - and Shopify net sales. Clicks, notably, were not affected by the Search Console bug. Across the stores we work on, we're routinely seeing Pearson correlation coefficients in the range of 0.7 to 0.9. It doesn't replace a properly configured analytics setup, but it gives you something that consent mode can't suppress and attribution models can't distort.
If you run a large-catalogue Shopify store and want to know what your correlation looks like, send me a message with your domain. We'll need a Search Console export and a Shopify net sales export - a couple of files - and we can turn it around in about 20 minutes.
🔗 The 20% rule: benchmarking organic revenue for Shopify stores
March in numbers
Global ecommerce revenues in March 2026 reached $404.1 billion - a 13.3% increase year-on-year and a reversal of the slight dip seen in February. Greater China led growth at 16.8% year-on-year. The UK came in at 11.7% and Germany at 10.0%.
For context: global ecommerce was $370.1 billion in February, so the month-on-month step up is meaningful, not just seasonal. The UK number in particular is worth sitting with - 11.7% year-on-year growth in a market that has felt difficult for most of the operators we speak to. The macro pressure is real, but the channel is still growing.
🔗 ECDB: E-commerce recap, March 2026
Jobs
This is something new for BlinkTank - we're going to start featuring open roles from brands, partners and agencies in the large catalogue Shopify store ecosystem. If you'd like your listing included in a future issue, just drop me a message.
We're kicking it off with Heur - an ecommerce agency we work closely with and can very much vouch for. They're hiring across three roles right now:
▸ Paid Media Manager ▸ Paid Media Executive ▸ Ecommerce Executive
Following on from the agentic commerce piece above - a relevant tool from Mersudin Forbes. He's been building agentchecker.ai, which audits your website for agent usability. Think of it as a Lighthouse score for the agentic web: it checks whether your site's forms, content, and conversion paths are actually navigable by an autonomous agent rather than just a human clicking through.
It is a logical next question to the one we keep asking about agentic commerce. Discoverability is one layer of the problem. Whether an agent can actually complete a task on your store once it arrives there is a separate one entirely. Worth checking where your store sits.
🔗 agentchecker.ai
See you next week - and hopefully some of you on the 30th.
Sam
Who am I and what does Blink do?
I'm Sam Wright, Managing Director and founder of Blink SEO. We're a search marketing agency that works exclusively with large-catalogue Shopify stores - the kind where the challenge isn't just visibility, but helping customers find the right product in the first place.
We specialise in SEO and PPC for merchants managing hundreds or thousands of products. Most of our work starts with taxonomy: how a store is structured and categorised, and what that means for organic performance, paid efficiency, and on-site discovery.
If you found this useful and aren't already subscribed, you can sign up at blinkseo.co.uk/blinktank.
If you run a large-catalogue Shopify store and want to talk about organic or paid performance, reply to this email or find me at blinkseo.co.uk.