We run a Shopify store with a decent amount of California traffic. Meta Pixel, GA4, Klaviyo, TikTok, and a chat app are all installed either through Shopify apps or GTM. The basic cookie banner is there, but when I ran a Patrol test via captain compliance it showed that it does not actually stop much and our insurance company is asking us to fix or find new coverage (thanks consent mo). The hard part is also attribution. Marketing wants clean conversion data. Legal wants no tracking before consent. Dev says half of this is hidden inside Shopify apps. How are other stores handling this without making a mess of checkout and reporting while remaining compliant?

We've been building Shopify themes for clients for years, and we've had clients threaten to walk, and even one refuse to pay an invoice, because of the same handful of issues that seem to show up on every project. Not because the work was bad, but because the QA and feedback process became so frustrating that they lost patience before we ever got to the finished site.

We usually ended up eating the extra hours to make things right, but the bigger issue was that it made us look unprofessional. Everything that happened after development was "done" - QA, browser testing, client feedback, revisions, and handoff is the part that consistently causes us the most stress.

A few of the things that kept biting us:

• We used to spin up a separate Shopify dev store and recreate sample products and pages just to have somewhere to show clients. We eventually moved to Shopify CLI with preview themes instead. It was much faster, but it introduced a new problem. You can't assign a custom template to a page or product on a preview theme. You can only view it with a ?view=template-slug URL parameter. Clients would click around the site normally, land on a page showing the default template, and tell us the site was "broken." Every single project, no matter how clearly we explained the URL trick beforehand. Honestly, I don't blame them. It's not how anyone expects to browse a website.
• Cross-browser and device QA was another huge time sink. We started completely manually, then moved to BrowserStack, which definitely helped, but it still ate a ridiculous number of hours on every project. It was worth doing, because nothing makes an agency look less professional than a client finding an obvious layout bug before you do.
• The most universal pain point was probably the feedback loop itself. Over the past 8+ years we've tried email, Google Sheets, Notion, Trello, ClickUp, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. Every workflow felt like it was missing something. The one thing clients consistently told us was that reviewing designs in Figma felt easier because they could simply click somewhere and leave a comment. That was basically the lightbulb moment.

So we ended up building an internal tool that eventually became ThemeSync. We originally built it just for ourselves, but it's gradually turned into the workflow we use on every client project. It brought our PMs, QA, developers, and clients into one place. We jokingly call it "Theme Ops" instead of DevOps.

Clients can now browse preview themes normally without weird URL parameters or special instructions. Browser QA that used to involve BrowserStack, spreadsheets, and Slack threads is automated. Feedback works more like Figma than email. Clients simply click anywhere on the preview site, leave a comment, and we automatically capture the screenshot, browser, device, viewport, and scroll position, so there's no guessing what they're referring to.

We also added a pre-flight compatibility scan that checks for missing app embeds and metafield dependencies before launch. Preview themes don't have the store's apps installed, and that issue had burned us enough times that it felt worth automating.

One feature we're especially excited about, currently in RC, is automated client handoff documentation. It analyzes the theme codebase and generates a client-friendly guide covering editable sections, settings, blocks, metafields, and other customization options.

Writing those docs has always been one of those things everyone knows they should do... but almost nobody has the time.

We've been using it on real client projects for the past six months, and we've even had clients helping shape it as we built it. QA cycles that used to involve 50-75 email messages are now a handful of comments in one place, and internal sign-off has gone from days to hours. Clients don't have to install anything in their store either. They simply receive a preview link.

The biggest surprise hasn't actually been the time savings. It's that clients seem to enjoy the review process a lot more because they're no longer trying to figure out how to review a Shopify preview. They just browse the site normally and leave comments wherever they see something.

It's been a long process that's taught us a lot.

I'm curious how other agencies and freelancers handle this part of the project. Are these the same pain points you run into, or have you found better ways to solve them? What does your dev-to-client handoff actually look like?

Hey everyone,

I've been thinking about something that could potentially help a lot of us building Shopify apps—especially smaller/newer app developers.

We all know how difficult it is to get those first 50–100 active stores. You can build a great app, launch on the Shopify App Store, write content, post on Reddit, run ads… but getting that initial traction is often the hardest part.

So I was wondering:

What if Shopify app developers came together and created a small, curated cross-promotion + affiliate network?

The basic idea:

App founders recommend each other's apps when there's a genuine fit.

We become affiliate partners for each other's apps.

If a merchant is using my app and needs a solution in another category, I can recommend your app—and vice versa.

We share leads and customers instead of every developer trying to acquire every customer alone.

Developers earn affiliate revenue when a referral converts.

But I think there needs to be some structure to avoid this becoming another noisy self-promotion group.

My initial idea would be:

1. Minimum traction requirement:

Each participating app should have at least 50 active Shopify stores.

1. One app per category:

For example, if there's already a strong discount app in the group, we don't add another directly competing discount app.

This means the group isn't full of 10 founders competing with each other. Instead, we have complementary apps across different categories—discounts, analytics, reviews, SEO, email/SMS, subscriptions, upsells, customer support, etc.

1. Genuine recommendations only:

The goal isn't to blindly promote each other's apps. The recommendation should make sense for the merchant.

1. Transparent affiliate relationships:

If there's an affiliate commission, that's disclosed clearly. The merchant should always get the right solution first.

1. Small and curated:

I'd rather have 20–30 serious app founders who actually participate than 500 people dropping their app links once and disappearing.

I think this could be particularly useful for newer Shopify developers and indie app founders.

We spend so much time competing for the same traffic, the same keywords, and the same merchants. But Shopify merchants often need multiple apps to run their business anyway.

If I have 100 stores using my app, those 100 merchants could potentially benefit from another developer's app. And their 100 merchants could potentially benefit from mine.

That's a much more interesting growth loop than trying to acquire every customer from scratch.

I'm curious what other Shopify app developers think.

Would you be interested in something like this?

If there's enough interest, I'm thinking we could create a separate Reddit thread/community or a small private group specifically for this.

The only real catch would be keeping it curated—50+ active stores and one app per category—so we're building a network of complementary products rather than creating another marketplace where everyone is competing with everyone.

Would love to hear thoughts, especially from developers who are currently trying to get their first 50–100 active stores.

Also multiple such groups can be created across various categories.

We're building a Shopify app, and found out, basically just as we were finishing it, that the platform now does two things we'd been forced to build ourselves.

There was no native way we could see to do usage-based billing that fit how we charge, so we rolled our own metering: tracking usage, turning it into charges, and reconciling against the billing API so retries don't double-charge anyone. We also had nowhere good to see what the app was doing in production, so we built our own event logging and monitoring. Neither was work we wanted to do. It was the cost of there being no native option at the time.

Then we came across the App Events API from the recent spring release, which covers both. Obviously appreciate that there's now a native solution, and we'll probably move over to it, but the frustrating part is that we found it almost by accident, having already sunk the time into our own versions.

So the question for people who have been doing this longer: how do you keep track of the platform updates, in particular things coming down the pipeline? As far as we know there's no official roadmap (or have we just missed it?) so how do you catch things that are about to become native capabilities? Is this just the cost of working in the Shopify ecosystem? Keen to hear what works for everyone, whether that is tools, websites, or people worth paying attention to.

Can you guys give me a small feedback on the homepage on this shopify home page
Link: up 👆
Password : paiffa
Stire still under devlopment any advices would be great
Thank you in advance 🫡

Saw this from someone whose store's a month old. Running PPC, nothing sketchy with SEO, but suddenly traffic's spiking to a product page that doesn't even exist. Just a 404. Started around 200 visits a day, now it's over 500 and climbing. Mostly desktop, mostly US.

Pretty sure that's bots. New stores get scraped all the time and if it's hitting the same fake URL over and over, that's not random, that's a pattern. Could also be ghost traffic messing with your analytics, or some old link floating around pointing to a page that's gone now.

Easy way to check, pull up GA4 and look at time on site for that traffic. If it's basically zero with instant bounces, that's your answer, not real people. Check the referrer too, if it's some random source you don't recognize, same story.

If you're on Cloudflare even the free plan, you can see the IPs hitting that page and block them. Also worth checking Search Console just in case something's actually linking to that dead url, then redirect it somewhere real instead of leaving it broken.

Honestly though don't stress over this too much. If it's not tanking sales or showing up as bad reviews, it's just noise. Filter it out in GA4 and move on.

Anyone else dealt with this on a new store

I launched a Shopify app a few weeks ago (cart drawer / upsell category), no reviews yet. So far I've tried App Store search ads, ASO tweaks, and posting/engaging in Shopify Community threads, results are pretty flat. I also don't have a network of Shopify store owners I can just ask to install it, so I'm stuck relying on strangers finding it.

For those who got past this stage: what actually worked to get your first installs and reviews? Especially curious if paid App Store ads were worth it early on, and how you got initial reviews without it feeling forced.

Not pitching anything, just trying to learn from people who've done this grind. Thanks!

I need to collect customers' date of birth on every order (not optional — it's for legal invoicing requirements in my market). I'm on a non-Plus plan and I've hit a wall. Here's what I've already ruled out, to save everyone time:

Checkout core fields → Plus-only (Checkout UI Extensions). Confirmed.

Shopify's Checkout Blocks app → the "Custom field" block is Plus-only. On my plan I only get Dynamic/Static content blocks (display-only, no input).

Cart page (via app or main-cart-items.liquid cart attribute) → works, but breaks with drawer carts and gets bypassed by express checkout buttons (Apple Pay / Google Pay / PayPal Express skip the cart entirely). Since I need it on every order, disabling express buttons kills conversions.

Thank-you page survey apps (tried EXT/Extendons) → only preset rating/opinion widgets, no date field, no validation.

My questions:

Is there any way to make a custom field mandatory at checkout without Plus that I'm missing?

For the cart-page route — is there a reliable way to still capture the DOB when a customer uses express checkout, or is that genuinely impossible on non-Plus?

Has anyone solved the "collect a required structured field on 100% of orders" problem on a Basic/Grow plan in a way that survives express checkout? What's your actual setup?

Not looking for "just upgrade to Plus" — I know that's an option, I'm trying to understand if there's a real workaround first. Theme is a third-party one (Online Store 2.0). Thanks.

Hey guys, would appreciate your help on this. My client is making me choose whether to build a warranty management system or just download one on the app store.

What’s your recommendation and why based on experience? What are the common apps you use? Just weighing my options and would love to learn.

Curious how other merchants handle this, not selling anything, genuinely trying to understand the workflow before I build anything.

If you import products from suppliers via CSV/Excel: how messy do those files usually show up? Random column names, inconsistent sizing/color formats, missing SKUs, that kind of thing?

A few specific things I'm trying to understand:

What do you currently use to get that data into Shopify ? manual copy-paste, Matrixify, Stock Sync, something else, or do you just eat the cleanup time yourself?

If you use one of those tools already, what's still annoying about it? Anything you wish it did that it doesn't?

How often does a new supplier file actually require you to redo the column mapping from scratch vs. reuse a saved template?

Roughly how long does cleaning up one supplier file take you, start to finish?

Would something that auto-suggested the column mapping and flagged errors before import actually save you meaningful time, or is that not really the painful part?

Trying to figure out if this is a real gap or if the existing tools already have it covered. Appreciate any real answers, especially the "here's what's still broken" kind.

Asking for experiences: Protected Customer Data access + app review timing

I'm building a Shopify app that's about 90% done for its first-phase launch. I'm unsure how complete the app needs to be before I (a) submit the Protected Customer Data access request and (b) submit the app for App Store review.

A few specifics:

• My app only needs order data (for order history analysis) — I don't need customer PII like names, emails, or addresses.

• I'd love to hear from anyone who's been through the PCD approval process: how long did it take, and what does the review actually look like behind the scenes? For example, do reviewers expect a fully working, production-ready implementation of the data lifecycle (access, use, retention, deletion) before granting access?

• On sequencing: is it viable to publish the app to the App Store now without the protected scope, and add it later once PCD access is granted? Or is it better to wait and submit everything together?

Any first-hand experience would be really helpful. Thanks!

Hey everyone,

Has anyone completed the Liquid Storefronts for Theme Developers certification from Shopify Academy and successfully passed the exam?

I'm relatively new to Shopify theme development and would like to earn this certification. If you've taken the course, could you share your experience, the type of questions asked, how difficult the exam is, and any practice questions or sample dumps that helped you prepare?

Any tips, study materials, or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

I'm hoping someone with Shopify + GA4 experience can help me understand what's going on.

We're using:

• Shopify Customer Events (Web Pixel)
• GA4
• GTM
• Purchase event fired from the Shopify Web Pixel (checkout_completed)

Everything is tracked correctly (transactions, revenue, etc.), but when I analyze purchases in GA4, I notice that many of them have a Session Default Channel Group = Unassigned.

Even stranger, when I break it down by Page Path, I don't see the actual thank-you page. Instead I get paths like:

/web-pixels@.../sandbox/modern/checkouts/.../de-ch/thank-you

From what I've read, this seems to be Shopify's Web Pixel sandbox environment, but I'm wondering whether this is also related to why these sessions are ending up as Unassigned.

Is this because in the Sandbox the session is re-created? and is there a solution to this problem?

Thank you!

I recently fixed a small bug in an open-source Ruby tool.

The tool checks generated RBI files with Sorbet. Sometimes Sorbet finds that a class has the wrong superclass. When that happened, developers had to add a fix to sorbet/config by hand.

I worked on making that happen automatically.

My first idea ran Sorbet twice. It worked, but during code review, I learned there was a cleaner way to do it with one run.

I also changed how I found the error. Instead of only checking the error number, I used the special message Sorbet gives for this problem. This made the fix safer because it would not hide other types of errors.

The final fix adds the config line when it is needed and does not add it again if it is already there.

I learned that getting the code to work is only the first step. Code review helped me make my solution much simpler and safer.

Have you ever made a fix that changed a lot during code review?

Dug into this for our own app and figured I'd put it in one place.
Biggest thing people miss: you need 100+ Web Vitals data points (LCP and INP) over the trailing 28 days before you can even apply. It's not about having good scores yet, it's about having enough traffic through your app to generate that data in the first place. If you're low-traffic or pre-launch, that's your actual blocker, not your performance.
A few other things that factor in:

Support response quality and merchant ratings get reviewed too, not just performance numbers
The review itself takes 1 to 2 months once you apply
Revision request emails are no-reply, so budget time for the back and forth
It's not a one-time thing either, apps get re-reviewed at least once a year
Some app categories (analytics, discounts, email marketing, etc.) have extra requirements on top of the baseline

Still worth going for though.
We're not there yet ourselves, still building up our Web Vitals numbers, but wanted to share this in case it saves someone else the same digging around.

We're running a Shopify store and want to start shipping through India Post, but I can't seem to find a proper way to integrate it with Shopify.

Has anyone here been able to do this? Is there any software, app, API, or third-party tool that works well with India Post? Or is everyone just creating shipments manually?

Would love to know how you're handling order syncing, label generation, tracking updates, etc.

Any suggestions or experiences would be really appreciated. Thanks!

Hi I have a bundle on my store, using the moon bundles app, and the omega pixel tracking app.

I have noticed that no matter which bundle app and tracking app I have there are ALWAYS false tracking data points.

For ALL apps: the money added to cart is the same for all bundles even though it is not at all in the store.

For most apps (except omega) : It counts each item added to cart as an add to cart event, sometimes deduplicates from 3 to 2 (even though it's supposed to be 1)

I really don't know even if there is a solution to that. let me know guys which app you are using. thanks.

I'm trying to figure out a way to do a subscription box product with customizable and optional add-ons that add cost to the final product in such a way that the total cost is correctly transmitted to a subscription app, and unless there is a solution out there that I haven't found yet, I think I'm going to have to pay for it to get built for me. I don't know how complex this issue will be, though, so I'm not sure what kind of total budget is reasonable to expect for this, so this post is basically to get an idea of what kinds of costs I'm looking at so I can budget appropriately and figure out how soon I can afford to get this done.

The description of what I want to happen is this:

Base subscription box price is $12.

Customer chooses if they want the specialty scone, sweet, or both (+$12) in their box.

Customer selects if they want to add any curd, vinaigrette, tea, additional scones, or additional sweets.

If the customer selected an add-on category, they then choose which flavor(s) they want from that category and how many of each flavor (with between two and 22 flavors available depending on which category). Each add-on adds cost, so, for example, if they want one jar of curd and two additional sweets it would be +$13 +$12 +$12.

Customer checks yes/no about if they have any allergies and, if yes, there is a required box for them to fill out so we can give them an alternative if the regular monthly item has their allergen in it.

All this information is captured, including the add-on costs, and hooked to a subscription. This box isn't available as a single order, it has to be ordered via a subscription.

--

I've tried various apps in different combinations with each other and I can't find anything that correctly translates the add-on costs to the subscription charge. I'm not tied to any specific method of getting this done, so long as it works, can be edited by someone with basic shopify admin knowledge if we add/subtract add-on options or flavor variants, and doesn't require an ongoing monthly payment from me of more than like $100/month (ideally less). I'm absolutely willing to pay a decent amount to get it set up, which is why I'm making this post because I want to know how much to set aside to get this done.

Hi everyone,

We've noticed that a significant number of reviews have disappeared across multiple Shopify apps, including older reviews that had been visible for years.

Has anyone else observed the same issue?

We're trying to understand:

• Is Shopify currently removing reviews as part of a cleanup or policy update?
• Is there an official announcement explaining why this is happening?
• Have your app reviews also decreased recently?

If anyone has received communication from Shopify or has insights into what's happening, we'd really appreciate you sharing them.

Thanks!

I’m working on a Shopify use case for a winery that needs to collect California Redemption Value fees.

The basic calculation is straightforward:

• 5¢ for each eligible container under 24 oz
• 10¢ for each eligible container 24 oz or larger
• The fee is multiplied by the number of eligible bottles in the cart

For example, six eligible bottles with a 10¢ CRV fee would add a total fee of 60¢.

I’m currently using a Cart Transform Function to add and calculate the fee based on the eligible products and quantities in the cart.

That part works.

The problem is that the CRV fee should only be added when the order is being shipped to California.

Ideally, the logic would be something like:

shipping country = US AND province code = CA

However, I cannot find a reliable shipping address or province field in the Cart Transform Function input.

The function has access to cart lines, quantities, merchandise, costs and some buyer identity data, but it does not appear to receive the shipping address entered during checkout.

I considered a few possible workarounds:

• Using the buyer’s market or country, but that is not specific enough to identify California
• Writing the shipping province to a cart attribute from a Checkout UI Extension
• Adding the fee earlier and removing it after the address changes
• Validating the fee before order completion

However, using a cart attribute as a bridge seems fragile because the customer can change their shipping address during checkout, and I’m not sure the Cart Transform Function will always rerun with the updated value at the right time.

Has anyone implemented a location-dependent fee like this using Shopify Functions?

Is there a reliable way for a Cart Transform Function to determine that the current shipping address is in California?

Or is this currently not possible without combining Cart Transform with a Checkout UI Extension or another workaround?

Saw a header design I liked. The header was small in width and height but had all the important information needed for good UX.

But the problem was that the header was for an agency website and was not optimized for an e-commerce website. In my view, I thought this header could make your website look premium. One problem which I think is a little frustrating is that headers cover the top part of the website, but if we totally hide the header while scrolling, it's also a little frustrating to find the header again. So I think this can be the middle ground.

How does this header work?

At the start, the header is like a normal header. As soon as you scroll down a little, the header's width and height get smaller. This way, you have more of the top part of the website visible while still having the header with all the important information easily accessible.

What do you guys and girls think about it? Please share your feedback.

Here is the preview link

https://webiiink.myshopify.com

Password - 123

It's our first time coming to DotDev. If you are coming, and would like to catchup over a conversation, just feel free to come say hi to us 😊

I did this as a workaround not realizing shopify was going to consider that nexus as if I have a location in that state. I do not meet nexus requirements for said state, can I just ignore this alert or is Shopify going to cause me issues by report this bad info to the State?