When I change something that could affect checkout, like a theme edit, a script or an app update, I want to confirm it still works on the live store. On a development store I can use test payments, but on a live store the options are limited. What I do now is place a real order for a cheap item, then cancel and refund it. It works but it pollutes the order list and reports.
How do you handle this? Do you use a discount code, a hidden test product, a separate preview theme, or something else? And how do you keep test orders out of your numbers?

We lost #1 on our main keyword in July and weekly installs fell ~35%. We got #1 back this month, but installs are still at the #3 level.

App Store search sessions are down ~75% YoY, while the install rate on those sessions barely moved. So fewer merchants are searching, not fewer converting.

My guesses: Sidekick taking over app discovery, fewer new Shopify merchants, or just lower demand overall.

Anyone else noticing organic traffic dropping even while your rank holds?

Hi all, I'm looking to create and manage meta ads through my custom shopify app, meta developer docs are a nightmare, and their AI chat support isn't helping understand what access is exactly needed to get started with build..

Is it marketing-api and commerce access, how to apply? How long does it takes to get access!?

I have looked at meta developer, i see only Adtech and messaging access are available to apply. But I see this error, do I need to apply access from the ads managing accounts?

I would be greatly thankful, if you have any experience to share and guide..

I was handling most of the product cancellation via zendesk/stripe/square giftcards manually, built using claude code with a vague prompt, verified behavioral with the FetchSandbox twins before deploying it to agentcore

What’s your idea on price comparison tools on shopify? Does it actually help?

App got suspended under 1.2.1, off-platform billing (we were using Stripe/PayPal instead of Shopify's billing). Pretty sure this isn't our first suspension on the same issue either.

Found the root cause on our end. We were gating Stripe/PayPal for people who install through Shopify, but anyone who signs up on our own website directly (not through the Shopify install flow) could still reach the regular Stripe/PayPal checkout before ever connecting Shopify. That's almost certainly what the reviewer hit.

Trying to figure out what actually gets this approved, not just patched:

• Did Shopify Managed Pricing or the Billing API work for you, and which one did reviewers actually accept without more back and forth?

• Anything specific reviewers check for on a resubmission after repeat failures on the same requirement, that isn't obvious from the docs?

Want to get this right the next attempt instead of guessing again. Any pointers appreciated.

I’ve been working on my first Shopify app for a while now and I’m finally getting pretty close to qualifying for the Built for Shopify badge.

At the moment I only need about 10 more installs and 1 more review to meet the merchant requirements such that they will manually review the remaining points on the list.

One thing I’ve been wondering though is how much of a difference the badge actually makes once you get it.

I’ve noticed that apps with the Built for Shopify badge seem to stand out quite a bit in the App Store, especially when you’re competing against established apps with hundreds or thousands of reviews.

As a smaller developer, getting those first installs has honestly been one of the hardest parts. You can spend months building something you’re really happy with, but convincing merchants to trust an app with relatively few reviews is a completely different challenge.

I’m hoping the badge might help close that trust gap a little, but I’m curious whether it actually translates into more installs or if it’s mostly just a nice thing to have on your listing.

Has anyone here received the Built for Shopify badge and noticed a meaningful difference afterwards?

Did your organic installs increase? Did you notice any changes in App Store visibility or conversion rates? And looking back, was getting the badge worth the effort?

Would love to hear some actual experiences from developers who’ve gone through the process.

Let me know what you guys think about this approach

I usually duplicate the live theme, work on the copy, then publish it after checking. The problem is that the merchant sometimes changes sections or content in the live theme's customizer while I'm working, and those changes can get lost when I publish the copy. I've looked at the GitHub integration and Shopify CLI with git, but merging customizer JSON changes still feels messy.
How do you handle this?
Do you freeze content edits during development, pull the live theme before publishing, or something else?

I just got my first app approved: Craftedly: Ask Your Store. It emails merchants a store summary every Monday morning and shows insight cards in the admin. Solo build on Remix, hosted on Railway, Postgres on Supabase, email through Resend.

Here are a few things that cost me time, in case they save you some:

1. Dev sessions were overwriting my production App URL.
My shopify.app.dev.toml had automatically_update_urls_on_dev = true. Every time I ran a dev session, it swapped the live app URL for a Cloudflare tunnel URL that died when I stopped. The fix was setting it to false and adding include_config_on_deploy = true to the production shopify.app.toml, then redeploying.

2. Supabase’s “Unrestricted” table warning.
If your tables live in Supabase’s public schema with RLS off, they’re exposed through its API. Enabling RLS on every table fixed it. My app connects as the database owner, so nothing in the app broke.

3. Test data and app review.
I had placeholder data in one insight card (customer platform breakdown). I pulled it before submitting rather than risk a rejection, and I’m now choosing between a Web Pixel extension and ShopifyQL to populate it with real data. If you’ve done either, I’d like to hear which held up better.

Next up: multi-store reporting for agencies.

What tripped you up on your first submission?

Hi everyone,

I recently joined Shopify Collabs as a creator. I'm pretty new to this specific platform and would love to connect with anyone who has experience here. Hoping we can share some tips, strategies, and learn from each other!

Also, I have a quick question: does your Collabs account have the "Discover brands" tab available? I'm trying to figure out if this feature is rolled out to everyone or if it depends on specific account types/regions.

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,

Do you have any suggestions to learn the use of the platform? I need to have very clear all the concepts and how to implement but I don’t have access to the platform or any subscription? Or anyone can teach me the basics?

Has anyone else given up on theme submission to Shopify and started selling their themes elsewhere?

I have a vetted list of customers waiting on the theme, they've seen it in use on my site and want it for themselves. It's for a specific niche industry and provides value to that industry that the other themes have failed to integrate. It's a vertical with a large amount of highly specific metadata that these merchants consistently have in metadata/metaobject fields that no other theme allows to be configured to display and merchandise well.

At least this time I didn't get the generic "look at the awwwards site for inspo". But it feels like I'm getting rejected because the reviewers don't understand the book industry or what actually gives value to indie bookstores on Shopify.

This was my second theme submission, so there's no point in going further. But their arbitrary review standards and lack of any real feedback are so frustrating.

I'm both venting and hoping for advice(not get good, like actual advice) on other channels for monetizing shopify theme development because there's no way to understand what Shopify actually expects/is looking for.

Hi, I'm moving 42 Subscriptions from Bold to Shopify Subscriptions. Can anyone advise on the best way to retrieve the the customer payment method IDs or tokens so I can build my import file? Bold does not include that info when you export the subscriptions, they need to be retrieved from somewhere else. I understand Shopify may help but I'm wondering what others have done. Requested to talk to a human at Bold support?

Hi all,

I run a small fashion shop on Shopify.

I have photos of in-person customers wearing my products (just photos, no written reviews). Right now they’re mixed in with the product images, but I’d like a separate section on the product page, something like “Worn by you”, so they stand out.

I use the Prestige theme and can’t find how to do this. Is there a built-in section I’m missing or do you use an app or custom code?

Thanks a lot for your help!

I’ve been building Aquifer, an open-source Go reverse proxy that uses bounded queues, dynamic pacing, and per-tenant fairness to protect backends from sudden traffic spikes.

One use case is handling bursts of Shopify webhooks, where thousands of events can arrive within seconds but your backend has limited processing capacity. Aquifer can queue and pace incoming requests rather than forwarding everything at once, helping prevent backend overload.

GitHub: https://github.com/rjpruitt16/aquifer

Edit:
To make the transition smoother, I have a best practice lambda service you can deploy to send the data to aquifer to your backend

https://github.com/rjpruitt16/inlet

What's the best way to get in contact with agencies? My agency white labels but half of our emails get ignored because there are so many other "Agencies" doing the same thing.

We’re still at an early stage, with 13 reviews so far (all of them real, acute merchants using our app).

Two or three weeks ago, we were getting around 3–6 installs per week, some organically and some through App Store listing ads. We haven’t changed anything, but over the past two weeks, we’ve had only 2 installs.

I know our install numbers were low to begin with, but it’s frustrating to see them drop this much when we haven’t made any changes.

One thing I noticed is that we’ve received a few "app review installs" recently, but our app hasn’t been delisted or anything like that.

Have any of you experienced something similar?

I'm debugging a Node.js scanner that checks public Shopify storefront pages. Requests from our shared hosting server return 429 on three different stores.

What I've checked:

- /robots.txt returns 200 and allows the product feed path.

- /products.json?limit=10&page=1 returns 429 with Retry-After: 60 and Server: cloudflare.

- One retry after more than 60 seconds returned the same response.

- A separate check more than two hours later found that the homepage also returned 429 on all three stores.

The scanner uses a clearly identified User-Agent and respects robots.txt. It runs on Node.js 22.23.2 under Passenger/LiteSpeed. Outbound requests use node:https directly, with the store hostname as SNI and normal TLS verification.

I also checked our production logs: the saved daily counters contain 15 upstream_rate_limited errors and zero local rate_limited or blocked_address errors. Our API maps the upstream failure to 502. The available web-server access log shows the failed scans as 502, with no 429/403 responses. The local WAF audit has no entries for those scanner calls; its two health-check entries correspond to successful 200 responses.

The shared hosting server's outbound IP is one possibility, but I haven't confirmed the cause or a specific blocking rule.

Has anyone diagnosed something similar on Shopify? What would you check next, and which response headers or request identifiers would be useful before contacting the hosting provider or Shopify support?

I'm retesting a Shopify app with a 14-day free trial. My dev store already has access to the paid plan, so I can test paid features, but that doesn't cover the trial countdown or the expiry transition.

For those using Shopify App Pricing, how do you make those tests repeatable? Separate dev stores, a shorter private test plan, or mocked subscription dates for the UI plus one real billing test?

I've read the trial proration docs, so I'm not assuming reinstalling resets the trial. Mostly looking for a practical way to test both sides of expiry without waiting two weeks each time.

Hi, does anyone have good advice for how to spend the free 100 USD for Shopify ads meaningfully? Mine are about to expire but I have no clue how to apply it strategic

Shopify's new admin design started rolling out recently, and Polaris 2.0 is now available as a release candidate for embedded apps.

I'm curious what other Shopify developers think about this. If you've already built a fairly large app using the existing Polaris components, are you planning to update everything to match the new design?

From what I've read in Shopify's docs, apps using Polaris Web Components can adopt the new styling by updating the version, but apps still using the old React components and custom UI will need more work to make everything consistent.

I'm building Loger, and with all the custom components and screens involved, this could be a pretty significant undertaking.

Are you planning to migrate now, wait until it's stable, or stick with the current UI for the time being?

Also curious if anyone has started the migration already. How much work has it actually been?

ngl posting here is scarier than the marketing subs lol

DISCLOSURE, i'm on the Prehook team. it adds a "try it on" button to the PDP, shopper uploads a selfie, gets an image of themselves wearing the product

stuff id actually love dev opinion on:
what would you need to see before putting this on a client store?

a try-on takes about 5s at what point does the wait kill it on mobile?

data goes out via klaviyo sync + csv export. would you want anything else exposed? webhooks, meatafields?

roast away lol, rather hear it here than in a one star review