Hello.
I am working on a web marketing tool, where one of the features is the ability to connect your Shopify store whose analytics we use to improve our marketing analytics and recommendations for the user. To be clear, Shopify integration is only a small part of our offering. We also support integration with Meta advertising and Google Analytics accounts. I do not plan to acquire customers from the Shopify app store. So, since we are not a Shopify-centric platform, we use Stripe for handling payments.
But I see that even if the app is not on the Shopify App Store I have to go through the app review, where one of the requirements is to use Shopify App Billing. After searching the forums, I found multiple posts of people asking similar questions and @KyleG-Shopify clarifying that you must use Shopify App Billing for customers acquired from Shopify, but you may use anything else for off-platform acquisitions:
So I went through the process of integrating Shopify App Billing, the way it works is that if the user discovered and installed the app on Shopify and didn’t yet at the time have a subscription, their account is now locked into Shopify app billing. Any attempt to subscribe to a plan redirects them to Shopify. For other users, we default to Stripe for payments.
I submitted the app for review on Aug 10. There were some bugs in the first 2 times, which were fixed.
Now, in the latest review result, the reviewer left this note: “While screening the application we notice that the app uses combination of Shopify App Pricing and off-platform billing, See this screencast for reference.” From the screencast, I see the reviewer registered a new account on our platform (not using the provided test credentials), didn’t install the Shopify app and showed how clicking subscribe redirects to Stripe instead of Shopify. That’s indeed how it’s supposed to work, and I mentioned it explicitly in the reviewer notes:
But as per the requirements, even if the app will be unlisted, we have integrated Shopify app pricing. For users that discover our service from the Shopify app store, we make them use Shopify app pricing. For other users that came from other sources, we use Stripe for payments. If a user registered for our service themselves, and then connected their Shopify store by us sending them to the app store listing, we continue to use Stripe for billing.
The reviewer is implying that if you want to integrate Shopify, you must only use Shopify app billing, which seems absurd, and not consistent with what has been said publicly on this forum. My app review has also been suspended until Sep 30 so I can’t even reapply at this point.
So what is happening here, have the review requirements changed once again? Please help me understand this. I’ve been stuck on this app review for over a month now.