Short version: Shopify approved us. We are an approved Shopify partner now, and the Zippendo app has passed their app review. It took four weeks.
We are a small team in Aarhus and we started this company this year. There have not been many moments yet where someone outside the building looked at what we built and said yes. This was one of them, so we are writing it down.
Four weeks of waiting
You submit the app and then you wait. Then a reviewer comes back with notes, you fix them, you resubmit, and you wait again. In the meantime you have a product you know works and a Shopify integration you cannot really tell people to install.
Four weeks does not sound like a lot. It is when you are on the wrong side of it.
What Shopify actually checked
Roughly what you would hope a platform checks before it lets an app near a merchant's store:
- Which permissions we ask for, and whether we need every one of them. We ask for orders, fulfilments and shipping settings. Nothing else.
- What we do with a merchant's data, and what happens to it when they uninstall.
- That billing runs through Shopify's own billing, on the plans Shopify shows the merchant.
- That a shop can install and connect without anyone from us on a call.
- That the listing says what the app does, and the app does what the listing says.
Some of the notes were small. A few were fair criticism, and the app is better for it. The install flow in particular got tightened up.
Why it matters to us
A lot of the shops we want to work with run on Shopify. Until now, connecting a Shopify store to Zippendo was something you did because you had heard about us somewhere. Now the connection is the normal kind, the kind you find inside Shopify, and we can stop explaining why it looks a bit different from other apps.
Getting reviewed by someone who does not care about your roadmap is uncomfortable and useful in equal measure.
If you run a Shopify store
If your store is already connected, nothing changes. If you have been waiting, you can install the app now from the dashboard under Order channels, or from Shopify. Orders come in, labels go back out as fulfilments with tracking, same as before.
A proper setup guide is coming another day. Today we mostly wanted to say that it happened, and thank the shops who used the integration before it had a badge.
Matteus and Jonas