Missing a way to identify Shopify plus dev store

GraphQL Admin API Troubleshooting
1

Hello!

There doesn’t seem to be a way to identify shopify plus development stores from real organization with the API. We usually offer our application for free for development store but a client contacted us with this screenshot, they have a real shopify plus organization and in it they have a development store, though in our partner account and in the API this store appears as a standard Shopify plus store.

image
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We usually use this query:

{
    shop {
        plan {
            partnerDevelopment
            shopifyPlus
        }
    }
}

But in this case partnerDevelopment is false and shopifyPlus is true. I also can’t find any other property in the API that would help me identify this store in particular.

Am I missing something or is there no way to identify those kind of development stores?

2 Likes
2

Hey @Tommy_Gaudreau,

We have a new field in the 2025-07 release candidate; publicDisplayName. This gives you more granularity around the specific plan.

If you add this field, is the plus development store mentioned or does it still just say plus?

3

Hi @KyleG-Shopify,

I also checked this earlier when I was testing but publicDisplayName was just saying “Plus”.

1 Like
5

Hi @Tommy_Gaudreau

If you create plus development stores using the dev dashboard, you should be able to query shop > plan to identify if it’s Plus and whether it’s a dev store or not:

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6

Hi Liam,

This particular case is not a partner development store that we created. It’s a user of our app that created a development store through their Shopify plus organization. (see the attached screenshot in my post)

Our app offers a free version for development stores, but development stores created through a shopify plus organization have no way to be identified with the current APIs.

7

Hey Tommy.

To add to what Liam mentioned, as the new dev dashboard is rolled out this would become less and less of an occurrence. Currently development shops created through a plus account do display solely as Plus.

For context on the development stores created through a plus account, currently these shops have the full feature set of a plus shop, and it’s generally expected that the app charges are billed as normal on these stores as well.

Just thinking ahead it may be helpful to have the merchant reach out directly to enable your free app plan for their plus development store. Plus stores often have unique requirements, so this would be a good way to open the conversation around what they need to ensure your app is going to be a good fit. That could also help you gather feedback on possible new features unique to plus merchants that you could build.

2 Likes
8

My app had an option to notify Plus development stores to manually request access, but we were actually forced to remove it.

At the end of August, Shopify reviewed our app. This was one of the required changes:

Your app must allow merchants to upgrade and downgrade their pricing plan without having to contact your support team or having to reinstall the app. This includes ensuring that the charges are successfully processed in the application charge history page in the merchant admin.

They sent us a screencast of our “contact support to request developer plan access” functionality along with this. There was a 9-day deadline, so we had to get rid of this. Since then, I’ve already seen Plus stores get away with using the app for free…

One other approach I tried: using the ordersCount() GraphQL query to try to automatically detect development stores (I assumed that dev stores would have zero non-test orders). However, this was wrong, and it seems that the live store’s orders may be factored into the results of this query. This means there is no way to detect Plus Partner Sandbox stores.

Overall, you only have two options as an app developer:

  1. Force Plus stores to manually request access, but risk being demoted in the App Store, or delisted entirely.
  2. Allow Plus stores to get away with not paying you, since there’s no way to detect whether they’re on a sandbox store.
2 Likes
9

Thanks for sharing that @tobebuilds. Would it work in your instance to offer the free development plan to only the new dev dashboard created stores? This way instead of risking plus stores getting your app for free, you have a more clearly defined process for developers to access your app.