Can regular Partner accounts be granted the ability to create Plus Sandbox stores?
The short answer is that no it is not possible right now but we understand why this is an important use case and something we are working to resolve. Stay tuned
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Hi, I’m also wondering the same thing. I’ve set up a development store for a business that is considering Shopify Plus. The documentation here suggests that creating a “sandbox store for Shopify Plus” is possible, but it’s not clear how one would do so. The development stores I’ve made through the partner dashboard list their plan as “Custom plan” rather than any one of the plans listed on the pricing page.
The pricing page mentions that Plus has up to a 10x higher rater limit on select APIs, and also exclusive API access and endpoints with up to 500% higher API call limits. This is rather vague and maybe it doesn’t matter for testing, but I’d hate to rule out Shopify as a solution because of limits in the test environment that would be higher on a production store.
Can anyone from Shopify provide any more information about any feature differences, API limits, or performance differences between the “Custom plan” of a development store and the “Plus plan”? And if they are different, how would one get access to the above mentioned “sandbox store for Shopify Plus” for a proper evaluation?
Plus Sandbox stores are only available to Shopify Plus Partners, there’s more info on their features here: https://help.shopify.com/en/partners/dashboard/managing-stores/plus-sandbox-store#features-and-limitations
Glad to hear Plus Sandbox stores are coming for all partners. I know the original “Shopify Plus Partner” programme was retired on 1st January 2025, with a new streamlined programme tiering. Perhaps this paves the way to remove that limitation.
We have set up and support several Plus stores for merchants, but for various reasons did not want to sign up for the original Plus Partner programme. Always been difficult to demo Plus features to new prospective merchants when we can’t have a Plus sandbox store.
Thanks for the reply, @Liam-Shopify. Do you have any more information about the differences between a plus sandbox store and a standard partner development store? The business I work for is trying to evaluate whether Shopify Plus will work for them, but finding it hard to do so when the test environment may be at a lesser tier of service.
Thank you for this perspective. What kinds of things do you find most difficult about this? Any particular limits or performance differences in the standard development stores that are different in Shopify Plus? Or is it missing features?
Hey @ezekielf
the differences between a plus sandbox store and a standard partner development store?
The link I shared eariler shows all the features of a Plus sandbox, and you can compare these to the features of a regualr dev store here: Development stores
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