It sounds like the Google Cloud outage in europe-west2 is limited to the europe-west-2-b zone? Its not a total outage, anyway. Our Google Cloud SQL instance in that region triggered failover this morning and has remained online since, because we're paying for high availability. So it begs the question, why are the likes of Lloyds, HSBC, Royal Mail, Revolut so badly impacted? Surely they're all configured for high-availability 😳? theregister.com/paas-and-iaa…

There's a well-known long running Shopify app offering search & filtering functionality that was bought out not long ago, and its new private-equity investor backed owners decided to start charging stores ludicrous prices purely based on their GMV, rather than on features or actual app usage as it was before. For one of our stores, the app's pricing went from $29, to $58, to $699 in a matter of months. The store is doing well, but not because of the app - far from it. The app's own analytics literally attributes £0 revenue in their own 'app impact' report. Its a brand that's being going many years, and built up a loyal recurring subscriber base and recurring revenue, the vast majority of whom don't even visit the part of the site that this app operates on. In fact, on that store, we barely use any of this apps' features. We just went with it for a consistent tech stack, as all our other stores use it too. We will be costing them next to nothing to operate - its a small catalogue, and we barely ever speak to their support aside from some initial setup they had to do at their end. After I argued this case with them, they offered a reduced charge of $300 on the basis they'd stopped counting the recurring revenue. One of our other stores, which is much larger and also has recurring revenue, only pays $69/mo for the same app on a grandfathered plan with more features (yes its a retired plan but it just shows what they used to charge, and that's how that app actually built up a great reputation - offering good value). They refuse to offer that pricing to our smaller store, or do a multi-store deal. This whole concept of buying up successful apps that built their reputation on offering great value and features, only to then start charging extortionate prices on them while offering less for it, is simply not going to work and is absolutely bonkers tactics in this new age of rapidly growing AI-backed competition. They fail to realise, such stores have many other apps they work with, its an ecosystem, and if they all started charging like that, it simply wouldn't be viable. They somehow forget how much Shopify charges for their plans, and how ridiculous it looks when your app (which offers a small portion of what Shopify does) is trying to charge similar amounts, if not more. In years to come, these private-equity backed apps will fail, after pumping in investors money, jacking up prices, and wondering why all their customers left. I used to recommend this app to everyone, now I do the opposite. We work on 5 Shopify Plus stores, and I'm now thinking what we do to migrate them all away from that app, and I'm sure others will be too. Luckily, not all apps are doing that, because some understand that you can't get away with charging whatever you want to exploit a merchants success, you instead have to prove your own value and offer more, not less. This is why I admire what @celispj is doing with Judge.me and their latest email app too. He gets it. They don't charge Shopify Plus customers more 'just because', in fact everyone pays the same. They don't charge on merchants success. Others out there need to learn and stop taking the piss, or risk extinction. Usual disclaimer: these are my own personal opinions, not those of anyone I work with or for.

Interesting early insights from a recent post-purchase checkout survey on one of the Shopify plus stores I work on. We're asking customers what led them to make a purchase today. The number of customers and revenue attributed to "An AI assistant (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude)" is more than double the revenue that Shopify has attributed to that channel through the agentic sales channel. It just shows that fully attributing sales from agents & LLMs is impossible, and sometimes just straight up asking customers is the best way to find out! * The survey question is a multiple-choice list, and customers can only choose one answer. Answers are displayed in a random order.

Looks like Shopify merchant admin isn't the only UI to get some love this week "The new Dev Dashboard: your command center for building" 👀 shopify.dev/changelog/the-ne…

Shoving a modal in a users face about your new feature the second they visit your Shopify app only leads to a poor UX and frustration. Users are not usually wondering around aimlessly wondering what's new. They have a task to do, and you're getting in the way of it - just don't!

This is awesome news. Glad I took the decision to build Shopify themes with Tailwind in the last few years!

Shopify SEO pro tip: resist the urge to update URL handles in Shopify's bulk editor because unlike editing products directly, it does *not* set up redirects from the old handles for you 🫠

Using AI to triage your live chat is fine, but for goodness sake at least do a regular review of the chat transcripts and fix where it goes wrong. This nonsense is happening every time I have to speak to Recharge's "Charge Bot", and I've provided feedback on it before 🙄

I'm amazed a platform as big as TikTok are allowed to publish a Shopify sales channel app, promoted by Shopify themselves, while lacking fundamental basics like recording tax on orders This has been going on since Nov 2023 with no solution 🤯 community.shopify.com/t/why-…

Another nice dev friendly update from @NotionHQ I'm just hoping it'll work in reverse (could we reverse-engineer an existing Notion teamspace into Typescript too)? I guess Claude could do it via the MCP?

These changes to Shopify blocks in liquid sound spot on 👏 V. happy to finally see Tailwind support added to Liquid themes too! We've been using it for our themes for a while ... kinda saw it coming as Shopify are a Tailwind sponsor ;)

Looks like discount combinations have had a bit of an upgrade on Shopify (Shopify Plus only) 'Amount off product' discounts now support combining multiple discounts on the same line item, based on discount tag It was mentioned in Shopify Editions, but I've only just noticed it

I'd really appreciate it if Shopify stopped changing the layout and style of our customer account sections without any action from us. We should be able to preview and apply changes ourselves, not have them imposed on us. A few weeks back they broke colours. Now layout. Not cool.

.... and it looks like Shopify may be back Meanwhile, they've sort-of acknowledged it on shopifystatus.com/ but its really downplayed given it says "Some merchants may experience issues" As I say, 6 out of 7 of our Shopify Plus stores were completely down, front-end & admin - affecting shoppers not just merchants. I'd really like to see Shopify acknowledge these things quicker, and more honestly / reflecting what we are all seeing, not downplaying things.