For beginners
Practical introductions to setting up a Shopify blog and publishing your first useful articles.
Your Shopify App Free Trial Is a 180-Day Budget, Not a Clock — and Only the Developer Can Refund You
Two things about Shopify app charges are documented and almost never read together. First, a free trial is not a countdown that restarts when you reinstall: Shopify App Pricing tracks trial days over a 180-day window, per plan, and previously consumed days are subtracted from new totals. Second, the refund is not Shopify's to give. The Help Center is explicit that refunds for third-party app charges are managed by the developer, that refund decisions are at the developer's discretion, and that Shopify can't remove a pending charge once it has been added to your invoice. The developer's own limits are narrower than most merchants expect: they can't refund anything above $1,000.00 USD, can't touch invoices older than 12 months, and on ACH-paid invoices are capped at 90 days. Verified against Shopify's Help Center, shopify.dev, and the App Store listings for Matrixify, Loox, and Klaviyo on September 13, 2026.
Shopify Has No Vacation Setting. The $9 Pause Plan Doesn't Pause Your Apps Either
Shopify's Help Center says it plainly: "Shopify doesn't have a vacation setting." What you get instead are four different ways to stop selling — private mode, the $9/month Pause and Build plan, full deactivation, and the frozen state you land in when a bill goes unpaid — and each one does something completely different to your app bill. Pause and Build turns off checkout across every sales channel but leaves every app installed and billing: "All your apps remain active after you pause your store." Deactivation force-uninstalls everything and charges your pending balance immediately. Missing a payment is the only state that freezes recurring app charges for you, and it costs you your admin and your storefront. Meanwhile listings like Klaviyo and Yotpo warn that charges may be billed outside your Shopify invoice, so uninstalling alone may not stop them. Researched September 6, 2026.
Shopify company account requests vs wholesale approval apps: what is native now, and what still is not
Two claims still dominate US wholesale advice: that Shopify B2B is Plus-only, and that Shopify has no native wholesale signup. Both are out of date. Since the April 2, 2026 changelog, B2B runs on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, and the free Shopify Forms app collects company account requests that sit under Customers > Companies > Ordering not approved until a merchant approves them. What is still missing: no way to add a buyer to an existing company, rejection means deleting the company record, and the form cannot run on a gated store. Five apps from $0 to $150/month close different parts of that gap, and they split into two different architectures. Researched September 3, 2026.
Shopify Validates Addresses for Free — and Tells You Not to Run an App Alongside It
Shopify's admin address validation is on by default, free, on every plan, and supports the US. Checkout-time validation is one toggle away. Shopify's own documentation then warns that running a third-party address validation app at the same time can create conflicting suggestions and reduce checkout conversion — you are meant to pick one. That reframes the whole category: apps are not there to duplicate deliverability checking, they are there to enforce policy Shopify's validator does not enforce, like blocking PO boxes or requiring an apartment number. We priced four real apps from the US App Store on September 2, 2026, spanning $4.99/month flat, $0.04 per order, and one that requires a separate subscription billed outside Shopify.
Shopify Carbon Offset Apps: Who Pays Decides Everything, and on Non-Plus Stores the Customer Cannot Pay at Checkout
Every carbon offset app on the Shopify App Store answers one question first: does the merchant pay, does the customer opt in, or both. That answer decides the billing model, the storefront surface, and what you are allowed to say afterwards. We priced six apps in the US App Store on September 2, 2026. Shopify's own help documentation states the Planet checkout extension is Shopify Plus only, so on a non-Plus store the customer contribution lives in a theme badge, not in checkout. The per-unit prices are not comparable either: Ecologi lists $0.28 per kg of carbon removal while Greenspark lists $0.01 per kg CO2e on its paid plans. And CrbonFree's pricing card says merchants retain 40% of what the customer pays for the offset, while Shopify's Planet documentation says Shopify takes no cut at all.