Shopify killed Koppel this week. Politely, and by the rules. Eighteen days ago I wrote Koppel is in. This is the other post.
For anyone who doesn’t build software
Shopify is the system behind a lot of webshops. Bol is the Dutch Amazon. Plenty of shops sell on both, which today means someone copies products, stock and orders between two screens by hand.
Koppel is a small add-on for Shopify that does that copying. You pick the products, they appear on Bol, stock and prices stay in sync, a Bol order lands in your Shopify like any other order. I started building it at the end of June.
To sell an add-on like that, Shopify has to approve it first, the same way Apple checks an app before it lands on your phone. You submit it, a reviewer tries it, they send notes, you fix them, you send it back. That is the whole process, and I had been through it once before with Proviand.
Two rounds
Round one came back on 4 September with two notes. The reviewer had no Bol account, so they could not connect anything and had nothing to test. And they wanted the demo video to show what happens after a product goes live. Both fair.
So Koppel got a demonstration mode: one reserved login that connects to a small fake Bol living inside the app, with a banner saying so. Building it I found that the demo login had never actually worked on the live server, which is the kind of thing you want to find before a reviewer does. Fixed that, re-recorded the video against the demo, and resubmitted on the evening of 15 September. That was the late night.
Round two came back on Thursday 17 September at ten past eight in the evening. In full:
Shopify is not currently accepting apps that connect to a marketplace system outside of Shopify. This applies to all apps that connect to a marketplace outside of Shopify.
Then a paragraph explaining that my own demo video had confirmed it. The products are sold on Bol, the money moves on Bol, and I do not own Bol. Case closed.
What that means
The rule is about the category, and my app is the category. There is no note to fix. Every hour since June was spent building something that, as of this month, cannot be sold in the place it was built for.
Which is a bit like taking your driving test, being told your parking needs work, fixing your parking, and then hearing they’ve stopped issuing licences.
In the first post I wrote that Proviand took three tries and I would be quietly pleased with two. I got two. Neither of them counted.
How I took it
Badly, for about a day. I had the whole loop running: products out to Bol, orders back into Shopify, tracking back to Bol, returns on one screen, and a repricer that had changed a real price on a real Bol account. All of it works. None of it matters to a reviewer reading a policy.
The thing I keep coming back to is the timing. The first submission went in on 2 September. If the rule had been in place then, the first reply would have said so and I would have lost two days instead of two weeks and a demo mode.
What happens now
Koppel is parked. I am calling it probably end of life, with one door open: the problem it solves has not gone anywhere, and there may be a version of it that does the useful part without being “an app that connects to a marketplace” in Shopify’s sense. I am not going to appeal. A policy that says “all apps” is not waiting for my argument.
The code stays. The demo mode stays. The repricer stays switched off.
Just not this week. This week is for the clients who paid me, and for being a bit less angry than I was on Thursday.
