App review suspended twice – billing subscription not syncing after approve

Shopify App Store
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1

Hi everyone,

I’ve been trying to get my app “Revenix Cart Upsell” approved for the Shopify App Store and have been suspended twice for the same billing issue.

The rejection message says: “the application is failing to sync or recognize the subscription status” after the merchant approves the charge.

After investigating, I found two issues:

  1. SHOPIFY_APP_URL in Vercel production was set to https://api.example.com (a placeholder) instead of the actual app URL. This caused the returnUrl after subscription approval to point to a non-existent address.
  2. BILLING_IS_TEST was set to false, which prevented the reviewer from approving the subscription without a real payment method. I’ve now set it to true for the review.

I’ve fixed both issues and plan to resubmit on July 3. Has anyone experienced this and can confirm these fixes are correct?

Thanks

2

Hard to see exactly how you are doing your billing flow without seeing the exact GraphQL request.

But I think I ran into the same thing during my review because I had assumed the reviewer wanted the subscription to be set up as a “test”. Once I changed it to live billing everything was accepted.

Good luck!

3

Thanks for the reply! Here’s what we found after deep investigation:

We actually had two separate issues:

  1. SHOPIFY_APP_URL in Vercel production was set to https://api.example.com (a placeholder that was never replaced). This caused the returnUrl after subscription approval to point to a non-existent address, so the callback never ran.

  2. The returnUrl was missing shop and host params. When Shopify redirects back after approval, it’s a top-level request with no session token, so authenticate.admin threw a redirect to /auth/login before our callback code ever executed.

We fixed both, and also added live Shopify reconciliation on every page load (instead of trusting only the DB).

Regarding BILLING_IS_TEST, we set it to true for the review because our test store had no payment method, yet the Approve button still worked and the merchant correctly landed on Pro plan after approving.

Do you know if the Shopify reviewer uses a store with a real payment method? That would clarify whether true or false is correct for review submissions.

We resubmit on July 3, will update the thread with results!