Hi everyone — I’m building an app for my marketplace platform, District, where sellers list products and buyers can purchase via buy-now, auction, or livestream, checking out entirely on District’s own platform (we have our own cart, payment, and auction/auto-charge logic). Shopify integration is a nice-to-have feature for our sellers, not our core product — the app lets Shopify sellers import their products into District, and when an order happens on District, it syncs back into Shopify as an order so the merchant can manage inventory, fulfillment, and reporting in one place alongside their other sales channels.
Our submission was rejected for violating App Store Requirement 1.1.2 (“Use Shopify checkout”) — since buyers complete purchase on District’s own checkout, not Shopify’s, and the resulting order is only synced into Shopify afterward via the Admin API.
I see marketplaces like Temu, Amazon, and eBay operating this exact way as Shopify apps — buyers clearly check out on the marketplace itself, not on Shopify, yet the apps are approved and orders still sync back for fulfillment.
What do I need to do to get approved to keep our own checkout flow (not redirect buyers to Shopify checkout) while still syncing orders into Shopify, the way Temu/Amazon/eBay do? Is this only possible by being reviewed/onboarded as a Sales Channel rather than a standard app, and if so, what’s that process?