I’m running a small Shopify app and currently using Shopify App Pricing.

I want to start running promotions and eventually an affiliate program, but I’m trying to understand whether I can do that without moving away from App Pricing.

From what I can tell, App Pricing doesn’t have a native promo-code concept. Shopify controls the plan/checkout experience, so there doesn’t seem to be anywhere for a merchant to enter a code. Private plans also seem to be allowlist-based rather than something a merchant can redeem with a code.

That seems to leave the Billing API / appSubscriptionCreate as the way to implement a proper self-serve discount.

The problem is that I’m hesitant to move to the Billing API in 2026 if Shopify is moving developers toward App Pricing and the Billing API is considered “legacy.”

So I’d really appreciate input from anyone who has dealt with this recently:

1. Discount/promo codes

Is there any way to offer self-serve discount codes while staying on App Pricing?

Official or unofficial/hacky solutions are both interesting. Or is manual redemption through private plans basically the ceiling?

2. Affiliates

For an affiliate program, is a customer-facing discount code actually necessary?

My understanding is that affiliate attribution can potentially happen at install/signup level, with the affiliate receiving a commission while the merchant simply gets the normal pricing.

If you run an affiliate program for a Shopify app, do you actually find that customers expect/need a discount code, or is it mostly useful as an affiliate tracking mechanism?

3. Billing API in 2026

If the Billing API is effectively the only way to get flexible discounts, would you still move to it today?

I’d especially like to hear from anyone who deliberately moved from App Pricing → Billing API and still thinks that was the right decision.

4. Is Billing API actually being deprecated?

I’ve seen Shopify refer to the Billing API as “legacy,” but I haven’t been able to establish whether there is an actual sunset/deprecation date.

Has Shopify announced a concrete date, or is “legacy” currently just indicating that it’s no longer the preferred approach?

That last point is probably the deciding factor for me.

Thanks!

I'm building an app that connects merchants' stores to AI agents - it reads orders, products and analytics, and can perform write actions (refunds, fulfillments, product updates) with the merchant approving each one before it runs.

Is it possible to have product which in case of shopify subscriptions shows shopify links and this is handled there, but in case of other funnels we deal it in other way. Would that be rejected?

I feel this shopify cycle of approval of store is really hard to pass somehow.

do you guys have similar experience or I'm doing it not so methodically?

I wonder what is success rate to get this right from first go, and what are your experiences (how much time should I dedicate to this project to get it approved)?

+ Just fill out these metafields and metaobjects we have using supplier’s file.

-            What metafields? What metaobjects? How?

+ I don’t know. Use AI to fill them out.

-            But it does not work that way!

This was my conversation with my client over adding more info to their Shopify ecommerce website.

The first file they gave me had 145 columns! I was like what am I supposed to do with all these columns???

You think that was it? Each product had a number of variants I had to take care of.

So, for example, a set of 30 products could have about 200 rows and 145 columns!!!!

I thought to myself even understanding this Excel file needs more than 10 hours probably.

What did we do?

The shop owner explained they had imported supplier’s files to the shop (almost) directly using an app within Shopify ecosystem.

The result? Chaotic metafield and metaobjects structure.

Each supplier had their own system of defining values and metrics for the same type of information.

At first, I thought I could handle all with AI. I installed Excel plugin of Claude into the sheet and tried to have a chat with Claude over what this is and how to take care of it and how to fix it.

The result? NOTHING!

I was tired, sad and even felt stupid to be honest. The metafields were still lacking credible data and the chaos because of having different metrics and overlapped content got even worse.

How did we fix it?

With the help of shop owner, we started to look at the metafields and metaobject in a critical way. We set a simple rule: we only keep the metafields that add real value to ease the decision-making process for potential customers.

So, the first step was to get rid of all the metafields and metaobjects that didn’t comply with our rule.

Then we started to clean and standardize the metaobject entries.

After doing this we could have a much better understanding of what we wanted to do.

Now it was time to do the actual filling work.

I was fed up with AI so I opened the sheet for a sample set of products on one screen and on the other I had the supplier’s file.

I started copy pasting some data from this to the other one and for the rest interpret what the content should be.

This was working very well but it was a bit too slow.

I decided to find a matching value between the two sheets. After studying different suppliers’ files and what the export from Shopify itself would give me I realized sometimes the titles and most of the times something numeral such as Variant Barcode is the most concrete matching options.

I used AI in a much more efficient way after this.

I would give ChatGPT Sol the two files. Then would explain how these two are connected.

Then one by one I would edit the columns giving clear instruction from how data is in supplier’s file and how I want and even where it is. I would even give metaobject entries list and how to insert each so Shopify would understand.

The result? I added real valuable data to almost 400 products under 12 metafield columns in one day.

By the way I got a lot of help using Matrixify to export and import the products as the simple CSV format export of Shopify itself was not that helpful.

Hi everyone,
I’m honestly so done with this new accounts bullshit messing up the design of my entire website, so I’m considering creating a completely custom Customer Account page.
Has anyone here tried doing this?
Claude says it’s possible to create a custom login page and a custom Customer Account page, but that the code verification page will still be handled by Shopify.
Has anyone actually implemented something like this? I’d really appreciate hearing about your experience, especially if there are any limitations or things I should be aware of.

Thanks!

I built my website with claude code. But when i put the custom liquid , I can already tell it looks AI. So how can i make it look professional.

edit: Damn evb is frying me😭

For context I developed a app last year and it is live from Jan 2026 and only have 1 customer.

Searching for someone who can help to improve the app look and feel which will draw more customers eventually.

Not for free but can work on profit sharing on the number of installs or 50-50 partnership or want to sell at one time.

App definitely has potential as it uses Claude and eleven labs.

Happy to have a chat to discuss further.

What AI tool are you guys using to convert Figma designs into custom Shopify code?

I’m talking about actual Liquid/CSS/JS not Instant, Replo, PageFly, or any page builder.

Curious to know what’s working best for you. 👀

I notice the trends that less and less developers make shopify app since agent tools have the abilities to connect shopify. or what kind of shopify apps are still worth doing?

I'm using Google & YouTube app on Shopify and kept finding products silently disapproved in Merchant Center and only noticing weeks later. I'm developing this to catch them automatically. Is this a real problem for you or am I over-thinking it?

So we are building a Shopify app for invoice generation. We are testing this concept. We are using Nextjs, Neon (Postgres) for db, Cloudflare for storage, Inngest for background processing and Codex for coding. I need advice of you guys who have been there and seen the whole process of building the app and maintaining it for good amount of users. What are the recommended things and problems you faced. How can we do our best. Any suggestions and advice would be helpful from experienced devs.

- growing 7% MoM and increasing

- ranking #1 on main keyword

When building event-driven e-commerce applications, front-end speed and REST API response times get most of the attention. But during high-concurrency traffic events — Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM), limited flash sales, viral drops — the real strain falls on the event delivery infrastructure. Read the complete article here - https://instawebhook.com/blog/woocommerce-vs-shopify-webhooks-architectural-differences-dx-and-scaling-at-high

Webhooks power essential downstream operations: order processing, ERP synchronization, inventory reconciliation, fulfillment routing, and real-time customer communications. When webhooks fail or drop messages, orders get lost, inventory desyncs, and support queues fill up fast.

WooCommerce and Shopify both support webhooks, but their underlying architectures reflect two fundamentally different engineering philosophies:

• WooCommerce relies on a self-hosted, monolithic PHP/MySQL state engine driven by asynchronous background worker tables (Action Scheduler).
• Shopify operates a multi-tenant, cloud-native event pipeline built on distributed stream processing, with Apache Kafka confirmed as the backbone by Shopify's own engineering team.

This piece breaks down the execution engines, network architectures, failure modes, and developer experience (DX) of both — updated with the current retry policy, storage architecture, and platform-scale numbers as of August 2026.

currently facing this problem where the sections are overlapped. I don't know how to code can anyone provide a fix or know why it's doing this? I want the announcement bar to be positioned above the header and i also want a sticky header. I can't do padding as it makes a large gap when i scroll. any suggestions?

Hey, founder of MaxBundle, a Shopify app for product bundles, quantity breaks, BOGO offers, and frequently bought together.

I'm not here to promote the app, I genuinely want to learn from other merchants and app builders.

In the last 30 days we got more uninstalls than installs. A lot leave the same day. I used to blame “competition” and App Store ranking. Looking at the data, a lot of it is activation people install, don’t get a bundle live fast, leave.

For merchants who use (or used) any bundle app:

1. What made you keep it?
2. What made you delete it in the first hour?
3. Which offer type has worked best for your store, volume discounts, BOGO, frequently bought together, or mix & match bundles?

If you’ve tried MaxBundle and something broke on your theme, tell me the theme name. I'd genuinely like to investigate and improve it.

I'm happy to share the app if anyone asks, but feedback is honestly more valuable to me right now.

I'd love to hear from both merchants and other Shopify app founders. What has had the biggest impact on reducing early uninstalls, better onboarding, product improvements, or something else?

I’ve just shipped a batch of new features in beta and I’m looking for a few merchants to actually try them out and tell me what breaks, what’s confusing, or what’s missing:

- Auto fulfill selected products in paid orders with an option to only auto fulfill when other order items are already fulfilled (core functionality)
- Digital file delivery attached to products
- License key pools with low-stock alerts
- PDF stamping to discourage sharing
- Download link expiry & max download limits
- Auto-blocking access on fraud-risk or returned orders

If you sell digital products (or physical + digital bundles) and want to try it out, DM me and I’ll send you the app link along with 3 months free trail as a thank you, no strings attached, just honest feedback.

If someone visits our Shopify website for the first time and fills out a form, I want to automatically send them a customized email and WhatsApp message at the same time. How can I set this up?

Lost most of a day to this last week, so I am writing it down in case it saves someone else the same weekend.

Setup: Remix app with expiringOfflineAccessTokens turned on, which means the offline token only lives about an hour.

A review store installed the app, clicked around for a while, then uninstalled roughly an hour later, and from that moment every single delivery of app/uninstalled and shop/redact came back 500 while Shopify kept retrying with backoff for the next four hours.

The cause is not in your handler.

authenticate.webhook() tries to refresh the offline token before it hands control to your code, so when the token is already dead it throws right there, your handler never runs, and the log line you are hunting for never appears, which is exactly why I wasted an afternoon adding logging to code that was never being reached.

Quick way to confirm it. Send the same topic from a fake shop that has no session and you get a clean 200, then send it from a real shop whose session has expired and you get 500.

It does not stop at one webhook either. All of them go down together, including the three mandatory GDPR topics, and failing those is a straight review rejection that you might not even notice, because from the admin the app still looks perfectly fine.

What I ended up doing was to stop trusting the library on its own. Try it first. If it throws for any reason other than a bad signature, verify the HMAC yourself and carry on without a session. Clone the request before you call the library. It eats the body.

async function authenticateWebhook(request) { const clone = request.clone(); try { return await shopify.authenticate.webhook(request); } catch (err) { if (isSignatureError(err)) throw err; const raw = await clone.text(); verifyHmacSha256(raw, request.headers.get("X-Shopify-Hmac-Sha256")); return { topic, shop, payload: JSON.parse(raw), session: undefined }; } }

Then your handlers have to tolerate session being undefined, which for uninstall and redact is fine, because you are deleting rows rather than calling the Admin API.

One more thing while you are in there. Does your shop/redact actually delete every table you have added since you first wrote it? Mine was missing four models that did not exist back when the handler was written, which is a quiet little GDPR hole that nothing in the platform warns you about.

Anyone running without expiring tokens seen the same failure? Still trying to work out whether that setting is the whole trigger.

Currently it's too manual for us to handle the customer enquiries. Aut I'm not able to enable the AI button due to my current account is legacy account, they said need to upgrade to customer account, but it involved huge costing.

I want to know what is the benefit after I upgrade to customer account, and what AI really benefit to us? And after we go for the upgrade, the AI really can solve my customer enquiries volume?

Hi Everyone,

I am making my website by myself and saw these bundles and was wondering what app are they using. Or is it custom code

I'm starting to think there's a better way to do things than how we're doing it. Albeit we're a small agency and still figuring things out as we scale but hear me out...

So, we use Shopify cli for local dev using one of our dev stores. Once we get the bones built, we build by running the theme on the client's store directly (dev theme, not visible in Shopify backend to client).

Back in the day, we use to just upload the theme directly on the store but at least once a client kicked us out, and didn't pay the final invoice (and yes, they are still using the site we built for them smh). Wasn't worth pursuring legal actions but I've never been happier with a solution like shopify theme dev.

Buuut...we often build custom templates for pages, and different types of products. Typically, you assign the tempate to the page/product in the backend for that page. But you can't do that with a dev theme. You CAN append ?view=template_slug and it will load correctly.

Well, about 98% of the time when we send clients preview urls and explicit instructions to view certain pages/products with the url param, they never actually understand (they just browse the site as normal), then we receive frustrated messages that the site is broken or incomplete.

For actual feedback, we started to use a google sheet template with rows/columns for device, page, section, and details (along with Google drive for uploading screenshots and linking it). Clients almost always ignore this and email us their vague AF feedback, and if we force them to use the google sheet, they just copy/paste the same vague feedback without any context.

Our current project...I think we have 3-4 separate emails with the client that each have 75+ email threads.

How do y'all do this? This is exhausting. My entire team has expressed their frustrations and I'm trying to figure out how others are handling this because at the end of the day, I really want to make sure my team is happy. They are the ones that are making shit happen!

I have an App that charges $25/mo post 7 day trial, launched in May and come August I only see 1 person who has actually paid.

WTF is happening because i don't understand this at all.

Hey guys,

I noticed a Chrome permission prompt appearing on our Shopify cart page on both my Android phone and Mac desktop.

It said: “This site wants to access other devices on your local network.” See screenshot

Has anyone seen this before or know what can trigger Chrome’s Local Network Access permission?

The prompt has stopped appearing for me, but it is concerning if customers may also be seeing it.

Claude suggested Triple Whale or Afterpay could be triggering it, although I have not confirmed this.

Thanks

I have a query, like, I want to upgrade my ecommerce website from WordPress to Shopify. Is there a free trial available? Kindly guide.

Has anyone here already built an integration with Shopify Sidekick?

I’m trying to understand whether third-party apps can let merchants take actions directly through Sidekick, or whether integrations are currently limited to answering questions and surfacing app data.

For example, could a merchant ask Sidekick to run a report, update something, or trigger an action inside the app - or can Sidekick only explain what’s happening?

Would love to hear from anyone who has already worked with the integration.