Hi everyone,
I’d like to share a situation and ask whether anyone has found a way through it.
What our app is (this explains the design)
Our app is not a sales channel. It’s a production tool: it helps merchants actually manufacture the items they sell on Shopify. It doesn’t try to mirror the storefront — it manages the production workflow for the specific items a merchant makes.
That’s why connecting a store does not automatically pull the entire catalogue into the app. The merchant explicitly selects and links the products they want to produce. The import screen reads their products live from the store via the Admin API, and once a product is linked, its orders sync automatically via webhooks.
For our users, dumping the whole catalogue in would be wrong — they only produce a curated subset of what they sell.
What happened
We were rejected twice and are now suspended until August 3. In the last review, the reviewer connected their own test store, looked at the app’s general pages, saw nothing from their store, and concluded that store data was not being fetched.
That is exactly what happens if the linking step is skipped. That step was documented explicitly in our testing instructions and in our demo video.
What support recommended
We contacted Partner Support by chat. The two recommendations we received were:
- Provide a shorter, more direct video instead of a longer walkthrough.
- Add a prompt at the end of the integration flow that takes the reviewer straight to the integrations page.
We’re happy to do both. But note what they are: ways to make the reviewer’s path more obvious — not fixes for a technical defect. Support also confirmed there is no mechanism to lift the suspension, while acknowledging the situation.
Why this is hard
A month-long suspension is a heavy penalty when the outcome came down to documented steps not being followed rather than the app malfunctioning.
What makes it harder is the uncertainty: we’re waiting a month for something that was never a technical issue, and even after we shorten the video and add the prompt, there’s no guarantee the next reviewer will follow the steps either. Reading other threads here, that loop looks genuinely difficult to break once you’re in it. Meanwhile this has pushed our launch by a full month, with no certainty attached to the next attempt.
My questions
- Has anyone had a suspension re-examined when the rejection hinged on test instructions not being followed?
- Is there a channel, Partner Manager or otherwise, to request a re-review in these cases? Maybe during a zoom session or similar.
- For apps where sync is intentionally merchant-initiated rather than automatic, how have you made that unmissable to a reviewer?
Thanks — I’m genuinely looking for constructive routes here, not to criticise any individual reviewer.