We’re building a custom dropshipping marketplace where suppliers connect their Shopify stores or Woocommerce store to sync products, inventory, and orders.
Customers purchase products on our marketplace, and not through Shopify. We want our Shopify suppliers to be able to see orders in their shopify store without login to our platform so they can see the order and ship it while staying in their shopify ecosystem.
Now when we submit this app, shopify has suspended our app review for 10 days as they considered it as sales channel and told us to implement shopify cart/checkout which doesnt make sense as this is just for data integration purpose.
Is there another app type that’s more appropriate for this use case? Can anybody help in getting our app approved so we can try our hand at becoming the next big thing. Dont forget this is helping Shopify suppliers staying in shopify store ecosystem and manage sales from other marketplaces without leaving shopify.
Hey @Shalin_Jirawla - thanks for reaching out. Just confirming a couple of details, since allowing suppliers to see external orders doesn’t necessarily make an app a sales channel by itself.
Are you creating actual Shopify Order or Draft Order records so they appear in Shopify’s native Orders and fulfillment workflows, or only displaying the marketplace orders inside your embedded app?
Are Shopify products and inventory published to your marketplace for customers to purchase, or is the integration limited to viewing external order data?
If you’re only displaying external orders inside the app, that distinction may be important. If you’re publishing Shopify products to the marketplace and creating Shopify orders after an external checkout, that broader flow is likely why it was classified as a sales channel.
Let me know how those two parts work and I can try to share a bit more specific guidance on the appropriate app type. Hope to hear from you soon!
We currently create actual Shopify Orders so suppliers can manage and fulfill marketplace orders directly from Shopify’s native Orders and Fulfillment workflows without logging into Twogooders.
Yes, suppliers voluntarily install our app and choose which Shopify products they want to sync to the Twogooders marketplace. We synchronize products, inventory, and pricing. Customers purchase on Twogooders, where Twogooders acts as the merchant of record and later settles with the supplier.
Our goal is to help Shopify merchants continue managing inventory and fulfillment within Shopify while expanding their sales to an external marketplace.
Could you please advise on Shopify’s recommended architecture for this use case? If creating Shopify Orders after an external marketplace checkout isn’t permitted, what is the recommended way for suppliers to manage and fulfill external marketplace orders entirely from Shopify Admin? Is there a supported API or workflow for this, or is redirecting customers to Shopify Checkout the only supported approach?
We’re happy to modify our implementation to align with Shopify’s platform requirements and would greatly appreciate your guidance.
Thanks for confirming those details. Since Shopify products are being published to Twogooders for purchase, with checkout happening on Twogooders and the resulting orders then being created in Shopify, this does fit Shopify’s definition of a sales channel.
For public apps distributed through the Shopify App Store, the currently supported architecture is to take the buyer to the supplier’s Shopify checkout with the relevant items preloaded, using either a cart permalink or a Storefront API-powered flow. The Shopify order would then be created through that checkout and remain available for fulfillment in Shopify Admin.
While the Admin API can technically create orders imported from external systems, that doesn’t override the App Store requirement against completing the marketplace checkout off Shopify and registering the transaction afterward unfortunately.
If keeping Twogooders as the merchant of record and supporting a single multi-supplier checkout are essential, I’d recommend raising that directly in the existing app review or with Partner Support to confirm whether any separately approved arrangement is available. There isn’t another standard public-app type that preserves that flow today.
Let me know if I can clarify anything further on our end here, hope this helps a little bit at least.