Partner Rev Share 4 Year Limit Lament 😔

Community Feedback
1

Yesterday, during a live Google Meet session with members of the Shopify Partner team, there were several announcements. Having joined the call about 5 minutes late, I apparently missed the most important one (listed in this Shopify blog post from July 7th, 2026) . . .

Forever partner rev share for all plans is now limited to four years as of August 10th, 2026.

This is devastating to me. Granted our entire business model at ShopaFree is unique (build stores for free for the partner rev share), but it affects the whole partner community. There were a lot of frustrated folks in the Meet chat yesterday. Mostly due to losing Shopify Plus opportunities to technicalities (which I have also experienced several times) such as past the 90 day window, or merchant is already talking with Plus Sales Team, or another partner already submitted a lead.

Joe Pizarro had two good suggestions (uncertain which “Joe” he is here or I would have tagged him). Summarizing and paraphrasing here.

  1. Open Window : If a specific time passes (say 90 days) and merchant has not signed a Shopify Plus contract, then it reverts to being an “open window” again and eligibility in dashboard is updated to reflect this.
  2. Eligibility Status : Before even discussing Shopify Plus with a merchant, partners should have definitive knowledge in their dashboard as to whether or not the opportunity is “Open” or “Pending” with another partner or in “Internal Sales” status listed. For “Pending” and “Internal Sales” there should be a date/timer/countdown.

Consolation Cold Comfort

It appears that adding .1% of GMV profit (excluding B2B and wholesale sales [why?] and capped at $100m annually) on all plans is the “trade-off” for sunsetting forever rev shares. This is cold comfort. Most businesses make next to nothing in the first year or two or more, if they survive at all. So .1% of nothing, is still nothing. Only higher end Plus stores that are already highly profitable (10 mill in the example in the above blog post) and migrating from another platform would be even remotely attractive, and even then only minimally, because of the four year expiration.

Plea Pretty Please

While I realize most partners do not emphasize or value the forever rev share as much as I do, this is my simple plea to whoever might see this (had no idea where to put it, since the Partner Slack channel was shut down in Dec '25, so “Community Feedback” in the dev channel here seemed somewhat fitting).

Please make it optional to opt out of the .1% and instead continue with the “Forever Rev Share”.

Thank you for considering this potential partner compromise.

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Hi @ShopaFree

Thanks for writing this out. Happy to clarify a few things:

On the incentives change: Any merchants you’re currently earning revenue share on are unchanged — nothing about your existing merchants or revenue share moves. What changes after August 10th, 2026 is the upside on new shops launched. The new model is built to grow with you:
20% of the base platform fee (net of discounts/credits)
0.1% of your merchant’s eligible online GMV
Every new product or expansion store you transfer or launch keeps earning in addition to growing merchant GMV

This new model makes it possible to earn more in the 4-year period, and offers more earnings to invest in growing your business. The more your merchants grow, the more you earn. That’s our main goal: Shopify sharing more of the upside with the partners doing the work.

On B2B: B2B and wholesale GMV are excluded from the 0.1% growth share because there’s a separate new incentive specifically for B2B. Partners who build and launch Shopify B2B earn a 20% profit share on the merchant’s monthly B2B Payments profit for a 4-year term. To qualify: submit a B2B lead form in the Partner Dashboard and attach a signed SOW for the build.

On lead eligibility: Leads are only eligible for 30 days after submission. The Partner Dashboard reflects that status in real-time and you’ll receive email notifications before a lead expires so you have full visibility.

Hope this clears things up - let me know if you have any other questions.

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Hi @Liam-Shopify

Appreciate you making the time to reply here. Keeping communication lines open with folks at the mother-shop always feels like a hopeful and good thing.

That said, I’ve read your response a few times, and referred back to the blog post I cited, and things are still a little fuzzy on one, main point.

Could you confirm or clarify, that after August 10th, 2026, that the partner rev share of the base platform fee will only be valid for 4 years on all new stores (regardless of plan), is that correct?

If so, then I unfortunately did read the blog post correctly.

Essentially, there is no more “forever rev share”, and that, for me, is devastatingly awful. It also says to all partners, we value your work and participation, but only for four years, then we cut you off.

To wrap this in another metaphor,

Shopify is adding lanes to the highway, and drastically shortening the road, so we all move faster towards an unwanted exit.

In literal terms this means trading the potential for more money now (gamble) for a more certain monthly income in the long run (reliable). While I can see how some would want this, it’s awful from my perspective and discourages believing Shopify wants to foster long term relationships with it’s partners. Hence the plea, to please give us on option to opt out of the “many lane but shorter highway” in favor of keeping the “single lane but infinite city street”.

That said, I do appreciate that the legacy stores will continue to payout as they have been, so that prevents hitting a brick wall. Just wish I was able to add more at the Plus level before the cutoff.

On the Plus note, so many of us (several in the live Google Meet partner session) have had the awful experience of losing Plus referrals. It feels built to fail on purpose at least some percentage of the time, which is extremely disheartening.

If the goal truly is to provide more value and better relationships with partners, then why not just add simple increased percentage tiers for partners? Five years ago, I wrote a white paper about one possible future of this called the Shopify Sherpa Program.

Thanx again Liam, sincerely. You’ve always been active in the partner community whether it’s on Slack, Discord, or here in the Community Forums. It’s appreciated.

Hope this is a useful dialogue, and look forward to hearing your clarification on the forever rev share.

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Hello everyone!

I’d like to share my thoughts, even though I know it probably won’t change anything. I truly believe this new policy makes partnering with agencies, developers, and other ecosystem partners much less attractive.

As someone mentioned before, most businesses don’t even make it past their first four years. So earning a revenue share during those early years may end up meaning very little. And once a store is finally generating significant revenue, Shopify keeps all of it.

To me, this change simply doesn’t make sense. I don’t think there’s any argument that outweighs the fact that Shopify just doesn’t want to share that revenue anymore and would rather keep it for itself.

It’s a shame.

In our business model, revenue share is a nice bonus, so it’s not something we depend on. Still, it’s disappointing because, considering the amount of business all of us collectively bring to Shopify, those 20% (which are most likely already factored into the merchant’s pricing anyway) probably didn’t make that much of a difference.

The worst part is seeing Shopify try to convince us that this is somehow a great deal. But in the end, it’s just a bad one.

We had plans to offer more affordable services to bring more merchants to Shopify and focus on building long-term revenue through revenue share. But that no longer makes sense either, because at some point (after four years, of course) that revenue stream simply disappears as well. Well… for us. Not for Shopify, since they’ll keep all of it.

In the end, it feels like a slap in the face to the people who genuinely help build and grow this entire ecosystem. The one upside is that today we have better tools and other platforms available, which gives us much more freedom to choose where we want to invest our efforts going forward.

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Hi @ShopaFree

Yes completely get what you are saying. I only charge a small fee right now, so having the referral each month is a very nice add on…. which I was planning to build up over the years to allow me to offer small changes and general support to my clients for free.

Such a shame Shopify is ending it and bringing in a four year term. The 0.1% revenue share is basically useless, unless the store is doing serious money, which will only be a very small minority and that will most likely come after the four years.

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I’m afraid I fail to see how limiting recurring partner referral fees to just 4 years is a good thing for partners, in spite of how Shopify’s trying to spin it.
0.1% revenue share is not going to compensate for the loss of recurring income over the longer term, especially for the majority of new stores which can take years before they generate any meaningful income.
Very disappointing news indeed :-1: