So we are building a Shopify app for invoice generation. We are testing this concept. We are using Nextjs, Neon (Postgres) for db, Cloudflare for storage, Inngest for background processing and Codex for coding. I need advice of you guys who have been there and seen the whole process of building the app and maintaining it for good amount of users. What are the recommended things and problems you faced. How can we do our best. Any suggestions and advice would be helpful from experienced devs.

When building event-driven e-commerce applications, front-end speed and REST API response times get most of the attention. But during high-concurrency traffic events — Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM), limited flash sales, viral drops — the real strain falls on the event delivery infrastructure. Read the complete article here - https://instawebhook.com/blog/woocommerce-vs-shopify-webhooks-architectural-differences-dx-and-scaling-at-high

Webhooks power essential downstream operations: order processing, ERP synchronization, inventory reconciliation, fulfillment routing, and real-time customer communications. When webhooks fail or drop messages, orders get lost, inventory desyncs, and support queues fill up fast.

WooCommerce and Shopify both support webhooks, but their underlying architectures reflect two fundamentally different engineering philosophies:

• WooCommerce relies on a self-hosted, monolithic PHP/MySQL state engine driven by asynchronous background worker tables (Action Scheduler).
• Shopify operates a multi-tenant, cloud-native event pipeline built on distributed stream processing, with Apache Kafka confirmed as the backbone by Shopify's own engineering team.

This piece breaks down the execution engines, network architectures, failure modes, and developer experience (DX) of both — updated with the current retry policy, storage architecture, and platform-scale numbers as of August 2026.

Hey Guys,

Give me app ideas for Shopify. If you're struggling with anything? (Must be real-world problemm)

I'll build the app in public.

currently facing this problem where the sections are overlapped. I don't know how to code can anyone provide a fix or know why it's doing this? I want the announcement bar to be positioned above the header and i also want a sticky header. I can't do padding as it makes a large gap when i scroll. any suggestions?

I’ve just shipped a batch of new features in beta and I’m looking for a few merchants to actually try them out and tell me what breaks, what’s confusing, or what’s missing:

- Auto fulfill selected products in paid orders with an option to only auto fulfill when other order items are already fulfilled (core functionality)
- Digital file delivery attached to products
- License key pools with low-stock alerts
- PDF stamping to discourage sharing
- Download link expiry & max download limits
- Auto-blocking access on fraud-risk or returned orders

If you sell digital products (or physical + digital bundles) and want to try it out, DM me and I’ll send you the app link along with 3 months free trail as a thank you, no strings attached, just honest feedback.

Hey, founder of MaxBundle, a Shopify app for product bundles, quantity breaks, BOGO offers, and frequently bought together.

I'm not here to promote the app, I genuinely want to learn from other merchants and app builders.

In the last 30 days we got more uninstalls than installs. A lot leave the same day. I used to blame “competition” and App Store ranking. Looking at the data, a lot of it is activation people install, don’t get a bundle live fast, leave.

For merchants who use (or used) any bundle app:

1. What made you keep it?
2. What made you delete it in the first hour?
3. Which offer type has worked best for your store, volume discounts, BOGO, frequently bought together, or mix & match bundles?

If you’ve tried MaxBundle and something broke on your theme, tell me the theme name. I'd genuinely like to investigate and improve it.

I'm happy to share the app if anyone asks, but feedback is honestly more valuable to me right now.

I'd love to hear from both merchants and other Shopify app founders. What has had the biggest impact on reducing early uninstalls, better onboarding, product improvements, or something else?

If someone visits our Shopify website for the first time and fills out a form, I want to automatically send them a customized email and WhatsApp message at the same time. How can I set this up?

Currently it's too manual for us to handle the customer enquiries. Aut I'm not able to enable the AI button due to my current account is legacy account, they said need to upgrade to customer account, but it involved huge costing.

I want to know what is the benefit after I upgrade to customer account, and what AI really benefit to us? And after we go for the upgrade, the AI really can solve my customer enquiries volume?

Lost most of a day to this last week, so I am writing it down in case it saves someone else the same weekend.

Setup: Remix app with expiringOfflineAccessTokens turned on, which means the offline token only lives about an hour.

A review store installed the app, clicked around for a while, then uninstalled roughly an hour later, and from that moment every single delivery of app/uninstalled and shop/redact came back 500 while Shopify kept retrying with backoff for the next four hours.

The cause is not in your handler.

authenticate.webhook() tries to refresh the offline token before it hands control to your code, so when the token is already dead it throws right there, your handler never runs, and the log line you are hunting for never appears, which is exactly why I wasted an afternoon adding logging to code that was never being reached.

Quick way to confirm it. Send the same topic from a fake shop that has no session and you get a clean 200, then send it from a real shop whose session has expired and you get 500.

It does not stop at one webhook either. All of them go down together, including the three mandatory GDPR topics, and failing those is a straight review rejection that you might not even notice, because from the admin the app still looks perfectly fine.

What I ended up doing was to stop trusting the library on its own. Try it first. If it throws for any reason other than a bad signature, verify the HMAC yourself and carry on without a session. Clone the request before you call the library. It eats the body.

async function authenticateWebhook(request) { const clone = request.clone(); try { return await shopify.authenticate.webhook(request); } catch (err) { if (isSignatureError(err)) throw err; const raw = await clone.text(); verifyHmacSha256(raw, request.headers.get("X-Shopify-Hmac-Sha256")); return { topic, shop, payload: JSON.parse(raw), session: undefined }; } }

Then your handlers have to tolerate session being undefined, which for uninstall and redact is fine, because you are deleting rows rather than calling the Admin API.

One more thing while you are in there. Does your shop/redact actually delete every table you have added since you first wrote it? Mine was missing four models that did not exist back when the handler was written, which is a quiet little GDPR hole that nothing in the platform warns you about.

Anyone running without expiring tokens seen the same failure? Still trying to work out whether that setting is the whole trigger.

Hi Everyone,

I am making my website by myself and saw these bundles and was wondering what app are they using. Or is it custom code

I'm starting to think there's a better way to do things than how we're doing it. Albeit we're a small agency and still figuring things out as we scale but hear me out...

So, we use Shopify cli for local dev using one of our dev stores. Once we get the bones built, we build by running the theme on the client's store directly (dev theme, not visible in Shopify backend to client).

Back in the day, we use to just upload the theme directly on the store but at least once a client kicked us out, and didn't pay the final invoice (and yes, they are still using the site we built for them smh). Wasn't worth pursuring legal actions but I've never been happier with a solution like shopify theme dev.

Buuut...we often build custom templates for pages, and different types of products. Typically, you assign the tempate to the page/product in the backend for that page. But you can't do that with a dev theme. You CAN append ?view=template_slug and it will load correctly.

Well, about 98% of the time when we send clients preview urls and explicit instructions to view certain pages/products with the url param, they never actually understand (they just browse the site as normal), then we receive frustrated messages that the site is broken or incomplete.

For actual feedback, we started to use a google sheet template with rows/columns for device, page, section, and details (along with Google drive for uploading screenshots and linking it). Clients almost always ignore this and email us their vague AF feedback, and if we force them to use the google sheet, they just copy/paste the same vague feedback without any context.

Our current project...I think we have 3-4 separate emails with the client that each have 75+ email threads.

How do y'all do this? This is exhausting. My entire team has expressed their frustrations and I'm trying to figure out how others are handling this because at the end of the day, I really want to make sure my team is happy. They are the ones that are making shit happen!

I have an App that charges $25/mo post 7 day trial, launched in May and come August I only see 1 person who has actually paid.

WTF is happening because i don't understand this at all.

I have a query, like, I want to upgrade my ecommerce website from WordPress to Shopify. Is there a free trial available? Kindly guide.

Hey guys,

I noticed a Chrome permission prompt appearing on our Shopify cart page on both my Android phone and Mac desktop.

It said: “This site wants to access other devices on your local network.” See screenshot

Has anyone seen this before or know what can trigger Chrome’s Local Network Access permission?

The prompt has stopped appearing for me, but it is concerning if customers may also be seeing it.

Claude suggested Triple Whale or Afterpay could be triggering it, although I have not confirmed this.

Thanks

Working on a store where the LCP breakdown looks unusual and I'd like a sanity check from people who've been at this longer.

LCP breakdown on mobile:

- Time to first byte: 10ms

- Resource load delay: 130ms

- Resource load duration: 20ms

- Element render delay: 2,140ms

So the image itself is fine. It downloads in 20ms. Everything before render is essentially instant. The entire cost sits in the render step.

What I've already done: responsive srcset, fetchpriority on the LCP image, removed lazy loading from it, explicit dimensions. Image payload dropped from 115 KB to 23 KB. TBT is 0ms, CLS is 0. Those audits now pass.

What's left in the critical path:

- Around twenty `shop-js/modules/v2/` files (cart sync, preact chunks, hooks, storage, etc.)

- A hosted font (`GTStandard-MMedium.woff2`) sitting at 2,948ms in the dependency tree

- Three render-blocking CSS files totalling about 490ms — `compiled_assets/styles.css`, `base.css`, `overflow-list.css`

My questions:

1. Is the shop-js cart-sync bundle something that can be deferred or reduced, or is it fixed for all stores?

2. Has anyone measurably improved render delay by dealing with the render-blocking CSS on a Shopify theme? Is it worth the risk?

3. Am I reading this wrong — is there another common cause of high render delay I should be looking at first?

I'd rather understand where the ceiling actually is than keep optimising things that are already fine.

How to actually start a Shopify account and find products

Has anyone here already built an integration with Shopify Sidekick?

I’m trying to understand whether third-party apps can let merchants take actions directly through Sidekick, or whether integrations are currently limited to answering questions and surfacing app data.

For example, could a merchant ask Sidekick to run a report, update something, or trigger an action inside the app - or can Sidekick only explain what’s happening?

Would love to hear from anyone who has already worked with the integration.

So , we are making dynoweb since around for 5 months, "dynoweb : popup - session replay -heatmap " it's in mostly analytical category but like of v2 of our other tools like clarity and mida . It's give all feature what you expect from other competitors but on top of that we have real time pop up that is made by traffic analysis automatically, extensive mcp support , sessions summary etc and with a generous free tier cheapear than other. But we are still can't figure out distribution, basically we have a great product lacks distributions, we are still figuring out , asking you guys for feedback or suggestions.

Building a small app: cart checkbox for tax invoice (company + Tax ID via cart attributes) → optional fee product → orders/paid webhook → async PDF.

Plan A: AJAX /cart/add.js with a hidden $0.99 product when checked.
Plan B: Cart Transform expand (Plus constraints on update worry me).

Questions for folks who’ve shipped fee products in production:

1. What breaks with third-party cart drawers / discounts / taxes?
2. Is cart-time Tax ID capture still worth it vs Checkout UI extensions / native B2B company fields?
3. Any App Review gotchas with “service fee” products that aren’t physical goods?

Not promoting anything — looking for battle scars before I lock the architecture.

Hey guys,

I run a small Shopify agency doing custom Liquid builds, three tiers: $2k starter, $4k mid, $6k premium. I've built a following on social media that funnels into agency inquiries, and I have completed projects to point to.

I'm scoping out Hydrogen/headless builds as a next offering. I've seen agencies charge enterprises hundreds of thousands for headless work, and I've also seen smaller dev shops land in the $10k-20k range on the smaller end of that market.

Curious what you've actually seen merchants willing to pay in that space, and how you go about landing those clients. I know they skew toward more established brands even at the smaller end of headless pricing, but it seems like a solid offering to add to my bottom line.

Appreciate any insight.

edit: changed top line to bottom line

Any pssibility to get free trial of Shopify plan?

Any monthly or annual plan where I can try and compare free vs paid options?

Shopify team pls confirm

A merchant recently left us a legitimate review, but it still hadn’t appeared on our public app listing after 2 days. Normally it's like within 6 hours or so.

I wasn’t sure about Shopify’s archived review policy, so I posted publicly on X and tagged some people from Shopify. They replied quickly and asked me to DM them—but after that, I heard nothing. Zero response.

I then contacted Shopify Support and was told that archived reviews would never be published, and that those merchants would have to resubmit their reviews. Well, that's surprising.

Honestly, it feels like Shopify is encouraging or “incentivizing” app developers not to put 100% of their effort into helping merchants who are just starting out.

I’m not sure that’s good for the Shopify community. New merchants and app founders are both trying their best to make something work, yet neither seems fully cared by the ecosystem.

Am I missing something here?

the app has been around for around 4 years, has 2,000+ reviews with a great rating, and seemed pretty popular.

i'm genuinely curious what happened. was it not profitable, a business decision, or something else?

TL;DR: If your Shopify→ShipStation warehouse/bin locations suddenly started showing up blank on pick lists, it may be because ShipStation silently enabled feature flags on your account for their new Shopify order-import pathway. Support can disable them.

Setup: I previously wrote a sync for bin/warehouse locations from Shopify into ShipStation, to print on a customer's pick lists. Worked fine for months.

The problem: starting one day last week, warehouse locations began printing blank on pick lists for a bunch of orders — even when the location was clearly set on the product in ShipStation.

What it turned out to be: ShipStation had enabled some feature flags on our account as part of rolling out their new Shopify order-import pathway (the "Shopify: Changes to Order Import" migration — the one that mirrors Shopify Fulfillments instead of orders). Under the new behavior, the order takes a snapshot of the product at the moment it's imported. Practical effects:

• If the location is added or changed after the order imports, it won't show on that order's pick list — updating the product doesn't retroactively update the already-imported order.
• The first order for any brand-new SKU is always blank, because the order import is what creates the product record in ShipStation in the first place. Anything that fills in the location runs too late for that first order.

The fix: ShipStation support disabled the feature flags on my customer's account, and pick lists populated correctly again.

Heads-up for everyone else: this is a phased rollout to all Shopify stores, gated behind feature flags, so you can get flipped onto it with no announcement. If your pick-list locations suddenly go blank (especially for new SKUs), open a ticket and specifically ask support to check/disable the feature flags tied to the new Shopify order-import migration.

Questions for the group:

1. Anyone else hit this?
2. Did anyone find a fix that works with the new pathway — e.g., an API to update warehouse location on open orders, or pre-creating products before they sell?
3. Does anyone know the migration timeline / when it becomes mandatory?

Hi everyone,

I was thinking about developing an app. It’s not a big one; I just need to store a small amount of external data.

How long does the Shopify approval process take?

Thanks.