Read-only app that mirrors merchant products to an external marketplace: sales channel required under 1.1.6?

Shopify App Store
1

Hi, I’d like a steer from the team before submitting a public app, so I don’t waste a review cycle.

What it does

  • Shopify-managed install with token exchange (expiring offline tokens), embedded with App Bridge.
  • Scopes: read_products, read_inventory, read_locations. No write_* scopes of any kind.
  • The merchant picks products (resourcePicker, plus an admin selection-action extension on the product index). The selection is stored on our side.
  • We subscribe to products/update, products/delete, inventory_levels/update, inventory_items/update, app/uninstalled and the three compliance topics. We read only the chosen products’ title, description, images, variants and an in/out-of-stock status derived from tracked, inventoryPolicy and online-location availability.
  • That data is shown on a separate marketplace site that has its own cart, checkout and payments. Customers never check out on Shopify.

What it does not do

  • No orders, draft orders, fulfilments, publications, ResourceFeedback, channel_config or order_attribution_config. No customer data is accessed. GraphQL Admin API only.
  • Background: an earlier app of ours was suspended under 1.1.2 for creating orders in merchants’ stores. Developer Support told us a new app with no order creation and no sales-channel configuration can be submitted on its own. This is that app.

Questions

  1. 1.1.6 says marketplaces should be sales channels. Is that triggered by what an app does in Shopify (publications, checkout, orders, attribution), or by what the destination site is? Here the app only reads, so I expect the first.
  2. If it is the second, would a sales channel be forced to use write_publications, ResourceFeedback and Shopify checkout? Those are what we are deliberately avoiding.
  3. Is there anything in the testing instructions or listing that helps a reviewer see that quickly? We already state it in the first paragraph of the test instructions.
  4. Is a read-only copy of merchant-selected product data to an external site fine under 1.1.13, with the merchant’s explicit selection plus a written data-sharing agreement as authorisation?

Thanks. Happy to share the testing instructions privately if that helps.

1 Like