Shopify Partners - Purchasing Themes & Apps

Community Feedback
1

I’m posting this to gather some community feedback on what feels like a senseless and counterproductive change from Shopify Support.

With the recent updates to how development stores work, Partners can no longer purchase themes or install paid apps on development stores. Instead, we’re now required to hand over the store to the client, forcing them to subscribe to a plan and access a store that’s still under development.

I’ve already raised this with Shopify, pointing out that it creates unnecessary bottlenecks in developers’ workflows, but so far the only response has been the usual “we’ll take your feedback on board” – which doesn’t inspire much confidence that anything will change.

Is anyone else running into the same issue? In my case, because Shopify still doesn’t allow collection imports, I rely on a premium app to handle that functionality. Now, due to these new restrictions, I can’t even pay for the app without making the store ‘live’, meaning I’m stuck having to hand over a half-finished project to the client just to complete a basic task.

It would be great if Shopify began properly consulting Partners before rolling out these kinds of disruptive changes to the Partner Programme and our development processes.

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Hi! I am fairly new to Shopify, but have many years of experience in other web and ecommerce platforms. I ran into this roadblock recently when trying to upgrade a client’s site from an underpowered ecommerce system. Once i had migrated all of their products into shopify, I wanted to use a bulk editing app to get everything sorted out BEFORE I made the store live. I was willing to pay for the use of the app - but could not do that. Instead, the client had to have the under construction / password page up - which I really like to avoid with an established business.

I did not realize this was a recent policy change. I, too, hope that Shopify will reconsider this.

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