Admin UI is a NIGHTMARE

Shopify Discussion
1

I’ve read books on UI/UX. I’ve personally designed 6 websites, both info and ecom sites. I’ve worked with multiple UI teams at very large corporations.

I’ve been using Shopify for over 10 years now I cannot believe how the admin panel still continues to get worse. Who is making these decisions?

The admin panel is used by business owners and employees, not customers. As a business owner, I need to complete tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible. I need to be able to find what I’m looking for in as few steps as possible. Like most other business owners, I have a million other things to do.

Shopify continues to redesign the admin panel as if it were customer facing, trying to make a clean aesthetic look. What they’re actually doing is causing thousands of business owners to pause and go, “wait, where did that feature go?”, forcing us to spend unnecessary time looking for things.

Ex 1: On the Orders page, I used to be able to single click the pre-designed filter for ‘Unfulfilled’ orders, along with ‘Unpaid’, ‘Open’, ‘Archived’, etc. They just redesigned it to consolidate all of these options into a dropdown menu. Now I have to click to open the dropdown, then click again to select ‘Unfulfilled’. We went from 1-click to 2-clicks.

Ex 2: When creating a manual order in the admin panel, if I want to apply a discount at the item level, I click on the price of the item and it opens a modal. In the modal, I can select discount type of ‘Amount’ or ‘Percentage’ from a dropdown menu. That’s it. 2 items in a dropdown menu. This is bad UI.

Ex 3: When creating a manual order in the admin panel, if I want to give the customer free shipping, I click on the ‘Add shipping or delivery’ option to open the shipping modal. The modal has two radio button options, ‘Shipping rates’ and ‘Custom Shipping’. When I select ‘Custom Shipping’, the name and price fields are pre-populated with ‘Free Shipping’ and ‘$0.00’, but only with placeholder text. Shopify forces me to manually type ‘Free Shipping’ and ‘$0.00’. It’s like they know free shipping might be an option, but they don’t actually give you a single-click option for it. Offer a 3rd button for free shipping! This could be a single click, but that would be asking too much.

I could list so many more examples. I’d love to hear from other users of the platform. How can we reach the Shopify UI team?

2

Complains and features requests have to go through a shopify support advisor
→ help.shopify.com → click question mark button next to chat (as of march 2026)

The reality is this will keep happening.
The admin UI is a generalized UI for the least common denominator for 5+ MILLION merchants ; and their staff.
You are paying to be in someone elses sandbox , not paying to dictate how the sandbox is built.

The only way out is to take ownership of your processes and build your own dashboards that are not hostage to the design whims of a billion dollar publicly traded company.
Anything else is cope and matter of wishful waiting while the clock runs out.

3

Take ownership of my processes? Build my own dashboards? Within Shopify? What are you talking about? Very unhelpful comment.

5

This is a persistent problem, sufficient for me to look for an alternative to Shopify, changes are random and normally of no real function, there is NEVER any advice that a change has been made, the latest one has added a nearly blank page to the order print page! In my mind Shopify has an office full of schoolchildren who must run to teacher at the end of the day “teacher Sir, look what I did to the admin pages, I hid the print button in a dropdown nest” - “yes that’s wonderful Johnny, will it help the shopkeepers to work more quickly? - Why no Sir but it took me all day and I’m sure you’ll pay me for it!”

6

Why would you assume building a dashboard must be within shopify when shopify is the problem being talked about not working in.
Excel or googlesheets are incredibly stable interfaces, services like retool, gadget.dev etc.

But if you must do it within shopify, merchants can now literally ask the AI agent to build in admin apps within limitations.

7

Corporate hierarchies aside they are not building the UI for you and you alone.
Nor is any other platform.
You want permanent stability build it yourself or be frurstated where-ever you go.

8

@Brian_Anderson .
Totally agreed, those are the solid examples. To reach the UI team, use the Give feedback option in admin settings that goes straight to the product team. It might help to also post this in the feedback board with the right tags.