Launched four years ago, the “Shopify Plus Certified Apps” program aims to promote an ecosystem of Apps capable of contributing to the growth of Shopify Plus customers.
As we know, Shopify's market shares continue to grow, notably among midsize and large accounts. More and more Shopify Plus customers are built around structured organizations with a lot of processes. These companies need to rely on professional technology partners.
And this is particularly true for the Shopify public Apps they want to use: these Apps must provide a good level of quality, service, performance, confidentiality and security, meeting the requirements of Shopify Plus merchants. This is exactly what the “Shopify Plus Certified Apps” program is about.
Program guarantees for merchants
By selecting a solution owning the “Shopify Plus Certified App” label, a merchant is assured of working with a Shopify technology partner:
- Offering an App available on the Shopify App Store, with a rating equal to or greater than 4, and a minimum of 20 reviews,
- Constantly improving its App to always be in line with the last two versions of Shopify APIs,
- Following Shopify's design and product guidelines and requirements,
- Supporting the latest evolution of the checkout (Checkout Extensibility),
- Offering 24/7 global support,
- Responding within 30 minutes to critical support requests, within 12 hours to high-priority issues, and within 3 days to other requests,
- Providing a status page showing if the solution is running as expected, or experiencing issues,
- Complying with customer data protection rules imposed by Shopify, or by local legislations (GDPR, CCPA/CPRA)
- Enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA) for its employees,
- Performing a security assessment test (including penetration tests) at least once a year,
- Hosting its solution on a trusted cloud provider (AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform),
- Providing a solution with an average load time of less than 400 ms,
- Pursuing a target of 99.9% service level,
- Not reducing the merchant's store Lighthouse performance rating by more than 10 points,
- Clearly displaying all legal information (terms of service, privacy policy),
- Having a proof of coverage for insurances in relation to the risks generated by the use of the App.
Benefits for Certified Apps
Solutions that are part of the “Shopify Plus Certified Apps” program receive several benefits:
- Ability to use the “Shopify Plus Certified Apps” label for marketing purpose,
- Listing in the Certified Apps official directory, as well as in the dedicated section of the App Store,
- Day-to-day support of a dedicated strategic partnerships manager,
- Access to the developer support,
- Inclusion in Shopify’s internal sales enablement processes,
- Inclusion in Shopify’s internal partner enablement processes.
95 Certified Apps to date
Four years after its launch, the “Shopify Plus Certified Apps” program includes almost one hundred Apps.
These Apps cover all topics that can help Shopify Plus merchants implement, manage and scale their stores.
Shopify has recently announced it will expand the program in the coming years by certifying new solutions.
We can therefore expect Shopify (and the Certified Apps) to communicate more about the program and its benefits in the future.
To discuss the "Shopify Plus Certified Apps" program and its scope, feel free to contact us.
