Disclaimer: with this thread I am not hoping to get a solution, I just want to express my sincere concern about this issue.
Context:
For almost 4 years we’ve been developing our shipping calculation app for Shopify that among other things is able to display real-time carrier rates.
Problem statement:
For a long time we (app developers) rack our brains to achieve a single “Built for Shopify” and “Shopify Plus Certified App Program” category-specific criteria as this seems to be the only way for us to market our app.
An important note, that raises another problem:
Shopify App Ads do not work for us since we are missing the targeting by Shopify plans which we found critical for our app: shipping calculation apps require a Shopify CCS feature, which is not available for Basic plan, so we have been wasting our ads budget on installs by Basic Shopify stores, which unable to use our app.
To the point: I don’t know how Shopify came up to this category specific criteria, but since our app is requesting real-time carrier rates and displaying them at checkout the carrier rate response speed criteria of 500 milliseconds seems to be totally unachievable. There are many merchants displaying rates from multiple carriers at their checkouts.
The fact that I couldn’t find any “Built for Shopify” carrier service app (the one that provides real-time rates) in the App Marketplace well illustrates my point.
Any comments are much appreciated, especially the ones from Shopify reps.
Thanks!