Troubleshooting Easy Brand Page

Most Easy Brand Page problems have one of three causes: missing or inconsistent vendor data on your products, a stale sync, or a theme block that isn't placed/saved correctly. This page walks through the common ones.

The directory is empty

Symptoms: you added the block, but the storefront shows no brands (or an empty placeholder).

Most common causes:

1. No vendor on your products. Open any product in Shopify admin, scroll to "Product organisation", check the Vendor field. If empty, brand sync sees nothing.
2. You haven't run a scan yet. Open Easy Brand Page admin → Brands → Scan now. Wait for completion.
3. The block was added but never saved. Open the theme editor, click into the section, click Save.
4. The block was added to a draft theme, not the live theme. Confirm you're customising the published theme, not a duplicate.

A specific brand is missing

Symptoms: most brands appear, but one or more are missing from the directory.

Check, in order:

1. Is the vendor spelled the same on every product? Inconsistent capitalisation or extra spaces (e.g. "Nike " with a trailing space) creates separate brands. Fix the vendor field across affected products and re-scan.
2. Has the vendor been excluded? Open the Brands page in admin and check the visibility column - it might be marked Excluded.
3. Are all the vendor's products out of stock? If yes, the brand may be hidden via the "Out of stock brands" setting. Restock a product, or change the setting in admin Settings.
4. Has a scan run since you added the vendor? Click Scan now.

A brand's link goes to the wrong place

Symptoms: clicking a brand card takes the customer to an unexpected URL.

Check, in order:

1. Does an unrelated collection share the brand name? The auto-matcher prefers exact handle matches. If you have a vendor "Nike" and an unrelated collection with handle nike, the matcher picks the collection. Either rename the collection, or add a manual mapping to the brand's metafield.
2. Is the search URL template customised? Open admin Settings → Search URL template. The default is /collections/vendors?q=%brand%. If you've changed it, double-check the pattern still works on your storefront.
3. Have you turned off auto-matching? If "Match brands to collections" is set to "No, always use search URL", every brand uses the search URL pattern, even if a matching collection exists.

Brand counts are wrong

Symptoms: a brand shows "5 products" on the directory but you have 8 products from that vendor.

Cause: the scan runs against active products only. Draft and archived products don't count. If 3 of your 8 products are draft, the count of 5 is correct.

To verify: in Shopify admin Products, filter by Vendor = your vendor, then filter Status = Active.

The storefront still shows old data

Symptoms: you ran a scan, but the directory hasn't updated on the storefront.

Causes (in order):

1. Browser cache. Hard refresh: Cmd-Shift-R on Mac, Ctrl-Shift-R on Windows.
2. Theme cache / CDN. Shopify caches Liquid output. Wait a minute and refresh.
3. The scan didn't actually complete. Open the Brands page in admin and check the "Last sync at" timestamp.

Search doesn't filter

Symptoms: typing in the search box doesn't reduce the brand list.

Causes:

1. JavaScript is disabled on the storefront (very rare). Search is client-side; without JS it doesn't work.
2. A third-party theme conflict. If your theme heavily customises script loading, the small inline script the block uses can sometimes be blocked. Try a different theme to confirm.
3. Vendor names contain unusual characters. Search matches against the rendered vendor name. If your vendors contain HTML entities (e.g. encoded ampersands), search may not match them. Clean up the vendor field on your products.

A-Z filter is missing letters or grouping wrong

Symptoms: brands starting with accented letters don't appear under their expected letter, or numeric brands appear scattered.

Open admin Settings and review:

• Standardize accents. If off, accented letters group separately - turn it on for unified grouping.
• Special character group symbol. Sets the label for non-Latin starts.
• Group numeric brands. If off, every digit is its own group.
• Numeric group symbol. The label for grouped numeric brands.

I uninstalled the app and the directory disappeared

This is expected. When you uninstall:

1. The block stops rendering because the metafield it reads is removed after Shopify's 48-hour grace period.
2. Reinstalling within 48 hours restores everything.
3. After 48 hours, you'd need to re-scan to rebuild the data.

Your products, collections, and theme are never modified by Easy Brand Page, so they're unaffected.

Performance issues on very large stores

Symptoms: the first scan on a store with 50k+ products takes a long time.

This is normal. The scan paginates through every product to extract vendors and inventory. It runs server-side so you can leave the page; only one scan can run per shop at a time (with a 30-minute auto-expiry on the lock if something gets stuck).

Subsequent scans are not faster - Easy Brand Page reads every product on every scan. If this is too slow for your workflow, scheduled syncs (Premium plan) let it run overnight.

See also

• Brand syncing - the sync mechanic in detail.
• Brand-to-collection mapping - link target logic.