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Browse practical Shopify app guides, beginning with the newest.
Shop Campaigns on Shopify: what the pay-per-customer model covers, and what it doesn't
Shop Campaigns is Shopify's own acquisition channel where you set a maximum customer acquisition cost and are only billed when someone converts. That billing model is genuinely different from retargeting and marketing apps, which charge for media, contacts, or visitors whether or not anyone buys. But the coverage is narrower than the pricing model suggests. Shopify Product Network placement is mandatory and breaks subscriptions, bundles, preorders, and checkout extensions; the third-party channel list is all-or-nothing across nine platforms; acquisition costs are not refunded when an attributed order is refunded; and since January 2026 the fees hit your Shopify bill instead of your payouts. This article maps what Shop Campaigns bills for against four apps that bill on a completely different basis.
The $9 Shoppable Video App That Bills $269 and the $15 One That Can't: Six Shopify Apps, Six Different Meters
Shopify already hosts, transcodes, HLS-streams and CDN-delivers 4K video for free, with lazy loading and autoplay support built into the video_tag filter. What shoppable video apps actually sell is the feed — tagging, swipe, UGC import — and they charge for it on six incompatible meters. Videowise and Tolstoy bill impressions, which means every page view counts whether anyone watches or not. ReelUp and Vidjet bill views, defined as four seconds of watching. Whatmore bills clicks. Moast bills nothing at all beyond a flat $15. At 30,000 monthly product page sessions, that difference turns a $19 plan into roughly $269 and leaves the $15 plan at $15. Plus the limits Shopify does impose: 250 media per product, 1,000 video uploads per week, and neither can be raised. Verified September 2, 2026.
Shopify Has No Store Locator — and the App Price Is Only Half of What You Pay
Shopify's Locations settings look like a store locator and are not one. The "List this location as a physical store" checkbox surfaces a location through the Shop sales channel, not on your theme, and Pickup in store only appears inside checkout. Shopify also caps you at 10 locations on Basic, Grow, and Advanced and 200 on Plus, which rules out any dealer network of real size. We priced five real store locator apps from the US App Store on September 2, 2026, and found the entry-tier cost per location ranges from $0.02 to $0.50 — a 25x spread. The bigger finding is the second bill: Storemapper and Stockist both state in their own help centers that the Google Maps or Mapbox account and its billing are yours, not theirs. One app avoids that entirely on its free tier by defaulting to OpenStreetMap.
Your Shopify Store Already Runs an Unauthenticated AI Endpoint — We Called It on Live Stores and Read What the Agent Gets
Every Shopify-hosted storefront serves an MCP endpoint at /api/mcp, and Shopify's documentation says plainly that it requires no authentication. We called it on two live merchant storefronts. Both returned the same five tools — catalog search, cart read and write, product details, and a policy and FAQ search — and a second endpoint at /api/ucp/mcp returned thirteen more, including complete_checkout. A headless storefront on a custom domain returned HTML instead. The payload an agent receives is your raw product description, verbatim: one live result handed the agent a description ending in "This product is not available for sale on" that store's own domain. What Shopify's free Knowledge Base app controls, what $290 to $1,330 a month AI shopping assistant apps actually sell on top, and the checklist. Researched September 2, 2026.
Shopify subscription payment gateway requirements: what to verify before you pick an app
Shopify's subscription APIs only work with a short list of payment gateways, and no subscription app can change that. Here is what US merchants must verify first, and how Shopify Subscriptions, Appstle, Seal, Recharge, and Loop differ on dunning and card updates.
Shopify Records the Exemption but Never the Certificate — and Its Own 'Exemption Management' Filter Returns 182 Mostly Irrelevant Apps
Shopify B2B lets you set named tax exemptions per company location, which is more than most merchants realize. What it has nowhere to put is the resale certificate itself — no file field, no expiry date, no issuing state, no audit trail. Under audit the state asks for the document, not the checkbox. Meanwhile the App Store's own Exemption management filter returns 182 apps whose first page is led by Indian GST invoicing and German fiscal receipt printers. Also documented: EU VAT exemption is machine-validated against VIES for $9.99/month while US resale exemption is a PDF nobody can verify, and exemptions set at company level do not propagate to locations. Researched September 2, 2026.
Shopify TikTok Shop integration: the official channel can't refund, can't return, and won't import a single pre-connection order
The TikTok channel app is free and made by TikTok Inc., but TikTok's own onboarding documentation states that returns and refunds can only be initiated in Seller Center — a refund issued in the Shopify order admin will not be reflected in TikTok Shop at all. Orders that existed before you connected never sync. Catalog sync is event-triggered rather than instant, and TikTok warns it 'might take some time.' Shopify Marketplace Connect does not connect TikTok Shop and never did. This walks through the five documented limits, then compares four real TikTok Shop integration apps that bill on four incompatible meters — flat fee, orders per month, SKU count, and undisclosed-until-you-connect — with the actual bill for the same store. Verified September 2, 2026, prices in USD from the US App Store.
Shopify Trade-In Apps: The Feature That Decides Everything Is the Payout Instrument, and Only One of Four Requests Store Credit Access
Shopify has native returns and native store credit, but no trade-in — no way for a customer to offer you an item you did not sell them, no condition grading, and no inbound label for a product with no order behind it. We priced four recommerce apps in the US App Store on September 2, 2026, and the deciding difference is not features, it is what the customer receives. Reading the Data access sections, Tern Trade-in is the only one requesting Shopify store credit scopes; Recommerce by Relished requests discount code scopes and neither gift cards nor store credit. That determines whether a $200 trade-in behaves like money or like a coupon. On price, Relished at 100 items a month works out to exactly $299.00 — the same as Tern's base plan — while Furloop covers 500 trade-in orders for $29.