Hello everyone,
I would like to understand whether there are any plans to change or regionalize the 500ms or less rate speed requirement for becoming Shopify Plus with a Carrier Service app.
Context:
Brazil has more than 930,000 different ZIP codes (CEPs), covering approximately 106.8 million addresses. In addition, shipping in Brazil is typically calculated based on weight, box dimensions, and order value, which makes caching extremely difficult or nearly impossible in most cases. As a result, we are fully dependent on carrier APIs to calculate rates in real time.
Another important factor is infrastructure. Shopify’s servers are primarily located in North America, while we are in South America and most carrier APIs are hosted in Brazil. This creates a challenging architectural decision:
-
Hosting our servers in Brazil increases latency when communicating with Shopify.
-
Hosting our servers in North America increases latency when communicating with Brazilian carrier APIs, and this latency grows with each additional carrier integration.
Given these constraints, achieving consistent responses under 500ms becomes unrealistic.
With that in mind, are there any plans to introduce different performance thresholds by region?
I may be mistaken, but it appears that there are currently no checkout shipping rate apps in Brazil that hold the “Made for Shopify” badge, which may be a direct consequence of this limitation.