Review specialist misunderstood our sales channel app: they thought we don’t own the sales destination. But actually we do

Shopify App Store
1

Hi Shopify team,

Our sales channel app review suspended because the review specialist misunderstood our sales channel app, they thought we don’t own the sales destination. But actually we do.

1. Here is our situation:

Our sales channel app review suspended with the following reason:

“To be classified as a Sales Channel, an app must enable merchants to list and sell their product on an external marketplace or public platform owned and operated by you”.

Our app meets all Sales Channel requirement, except the review specialist thought we don’t own the sales destination. But actually we do.

2. How our app works:

Our app offers conversational AI shopping and customer support solution. Basically, our app sync Shopify products and pages to our AI acknowledge base (we own the acknowledge base) and allow merchants to connect their WhatsApp as the conversation interface to sell their products with our AI. WhatsApp is a not data source.

3. We understand the API terms:

I understand that apps connecting or syncing data to 3rd party platforms that you don’t own is not allowed, so you need to own the sales destination. Under the API terms of service:

not, except with Shopify’s prior written consent, develop or distribute any Application that has as its primary purpose the transfer, sharing, selling, disclosing or otherwise providing of Merchant Data to any third party. In addition, any such third party must be bound by these Terms or another written agreement acceptable to Shopify addressing the use of Merchant Data. For the purposes of this section, the “primary purpose” of the Application shall be determined by Shopify in its sole discretion;

However, we don’t sync or transfer any data to WhatsApp or any of Meta platforms. We only sync data with our AI acknowledge base, which we own.

4. Our request:

Please review our case and clary can we still have our app as a sales channel or not.

Thank you very much!

2

Hey @SYM :waving_hand: thanks for laying out the full context here, and I understand why you reached out about this.

The tricky part is that we can’t really dig into a specific review decision from the community forum. We don’t have the Partner account context required for a case like this where the disagreement is about how your architecture is being interpreted.

One thing worth flagging: the sales channel app requirements define “destination” as the customer-facing surface where products are discovered and a sale happens - Google, Meta and Amazon are the examples given.

Owning the backend (your AI knowledge base) is a separate consideration from owning that surface, and the API terms point you’re referencing (not transferring data to third parties) is also a separate requirement from the classification question. It’s worth thinking through how your case maps to that specific “own and operate the destination” criterion before the next conversation, since it looks like the customer-facing surface in your setup is WhatsApp.

The best path forward is to reach out through the Shopify Help Center while logged into the Partner Account that owns the app. That puts you in an authenticated session with our Support team, who can pull up the review details, get clarity on how your app maps to the sales channel criteria, and explore whether there’s a different category that might be a better fit if sales channel isn’t the right one.

Hope this helps point you in the right direction!

3

Hi Wes, thank you very much for the clarification. I will submit it as a regular app.

Have a great day!