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!
Hi Kolevich,
Thanks for sharing your experience and challenges in trying to achieve the carrier rate response speed criteria. I’m digging into this on our side to see what the best recommendation would be.
Thanks Liam! Looking forward to it.
Is there any update on this?
Hi,
we’re facing similar challenges as well — we’ve been trying to figure out how to meet this criterion, and in practice it seems unachievable. We have two apps that cannot obtain the badge because of this.
I understand that the loading time of shipping methods at checkout is critical for conversion and needs to be as fast as possible.
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One of our apps calculates shipping costs based on origin and destination addresses. We use the Google Routes API, which returns the distance in kilometers based on two addresses, and then we calculate rates accordingly. The app is dependent on Google’s API, and unfortunately we have no way to significantly speed this up on our end. I noticed today that response times have improved, but I’m not sure what caused this change.
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Our second app is a pickup points app, and here things get more complex as we rely on two APIs:
a. Geolocation API — we convert the address into coordinates
b. Points API — based on coordinates, we fetch the nearest pickup points
Regarding point (a): a major improvement would be eliminating the need for geolocation — for example, if Shopify could provide coordinates along with the address in the request. This would remove one API call and reduce response time.
Regarding point (b): the issue is that while we store most pickup points in our database, there are some carriers that require fetching points synchronously from their APIs. This unfortunately increases response time and, as @kolevich mentioned, depends on which carriers are selected by the merchant.
Liam, do you have any updates on this, or could you comment on the points above?
