Clarifying store types for development

Dev Platform
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Hello Shopify developers and builders!

You may have noticed some recent changes to how we talk about “development” stores. Historically we have had “Development Shops” as a global term to describe shops that were created in the Partner Dashboard. Depending on what you chose when setting them up, however, some shops could be transferred to merchants and some could not. Plus merchants also have the ability to create non-production expansion stores, which we historically also called development shops.

We recognized how confusing this was, especially with the introduction of the Dev Dashboard. So we decided to clear things up:

  • Stores created by partners and merchants for app and theme development on the Dev Dashboard are Dev stores.
  • Transferrable stores created for clients on the Partner Dashboard are Client Transfer stores.
  • Transactional non-production expansion stores that Plus merchants can create for testing are Staging stores.

And to summarize their capabilities (which are unchanged):

Purpose Where? Can transfer Can test payment processing Works with shopify app dev App installations
Dev Build and test apps and themes Dev Dashboard No No Yes Free and partner-friendly
Client Transfer Build a store that will be transferred to a merchant and become a production store Partner Dashboard Yes No No Free and partner-friendly
Staging Mimic production for previewing merchandising, testing experiences. Plus organization settings No Yes No All

We hope this reduces confusion around “development” stores and welcome your feedback below on how we can further improve.

See our post on dev platform updates for information on other changes and planned improvements, including dev store permissioning.

-Nick

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Thank you @NickWesselman for providing that clarity! As a follow up, are you able to differentiate between these stores programatically?

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Hey @bkspace – Can you provide some more information on why you would want to do so?

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Absolutely! Currently ‘staging’ stores come through as a plan type ‘Shopify Plus’, which means it’s impossible to give them a test charge in Shopify billing out of the box. With managed billing, they’re also charged as a real production store. We’d like to treat them as development stores.

We see many uninstall reasons of Unexpected app cost , so we think there’s a optimised experience there to explore!

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@NickWesselman Can you check if there’s a post from me that got deleted or accidently marked spam it touched on a lot of missing things with links but I don’t know what happened to it.

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@NickWesselman Allowing shopify app dev on staging stores would be very useful for custom app development. There may be many settings and configurations (meta data, shipping, locations, inventory, etc) that need to be manually copied over to a dev store in order to build custom app functionality, which incurs extra overhead and provides a pain point for accurately testing custom apps during development.

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