Marketing Shopify App — Partner Friendly Apps

One of the major growth channels at PushOwl had been Shopify Partners (ie. Shopify Agencies, Experts, Freelancers, Youtubers, Influencers) using our Shopify App.

This blog is for Shopify App Developers who have launched a freemium or paid app and looking for ways to expand the reach of their apps. It’s really a small thing that leads to a huge growth impact. So small, that it would literally take less than 5 lines of code to implement it. However, when you look at the App Store only 303 out of 5000+ apps on Shopify have done it.

303 Partner Friendly App

So before we dive into how to make your App Partner Friendly, let’s look at what are Partner Friendly Apps.

What are Partner Friendly Apps?

Partner friendly apps can be installed for free by Shopify Partners. These apps are free to test in development stores. And the app partner only charges once the store is switched over to a paid plan.

So what are development stores?

• Shopify Agencies typically create new stores as a development store. This is especially used when they are building a new store — getting the designs and functionalities implemented. Shopify doesn’t charge the plan during the development.
• Development Stores are also used by Agencies to be replicas of live stores, where they push new changes first, test, and then set it live. We have especially seen Agencies working with high volume stores (mostly Shopify Plus) test functionalities of our Apps before putting it live on the store.
• Shopify App Developers also use development stores to test apps. To get inspiration from other apps, or test out an integration with apps.

Why should you make your App Partner Friendly?

In all the cases above, especially in the case when a Shopify partner is trying to set up your app on behalf of your customer — they might get this screen below if you try to charge them.

So by not making your app partner-friendly — you are losing on an insane opportunity. I recently saw this in the Shopify Partners Facebook group, and you can tell how frustrating it is for the Shopify Partners.

How to make your app partner-friendly?

Now this section might be a bit technical and is meant for folks who do the hard work ie code 🧑‍💻

There are two steps:

• Bill using test charge when upgrading for partner stores
• Cancel the plan when the store becomes a paid plan

Bill using test charge when upgrading for partner stores

Now, here’s come the less than 5 lines of code magic. All you need to do is pass a flag {test: true} when billing your app for Development Stores.

Reference: https://shopify.dev/docs/admin-api/rest/reference/billing/recurringapplicationcharge

You can identify if a store is a development store or not using the Shopify Plan. This data is found in the Shop API At PushOwl we store shop data in our database, so it’s quick to identify a development store without calling the Shop API at the time of upgrade.

Typically a development store has Shopify Plan as affiliate . But in recent days we have identified ~27 distinct Shopify Plans. I have listed them all here.

At PushOwl we do test charges for Shopify Plans which are:

• affiliate
• partner_test
• plus_partner_sandbox

Apart from development stores we also do test charges for stores run by the Shopify team and alumni.

• staff
• staff_business

Python Code Snippet to Allow Test Charges

Python Code Snippet to Initiate Test Charge

Cancel the plan when the store becomes a paid plan

Listen to the shop/update Webhook, so when the store switches to a paid plan, you can cancel the paid features. You can also consider sending an email to remind the merchant to switch back to the paid plan.

Code Snippet to cancel Paid Plan

Once you have made your app partner-friendly, submit your app to Shopify to get included in the partner-friendly apps collection. The form can be found here.

• https://apps.shopify.com/collections/partner-friendly-apps

That’s about it. You just made your app better for Shopify Partners and opened up a new channel for marketing.