Help with app review - payment app...

Retired Boards Appdev Extensions
1

Hi,

Tall Emu is a CRM system that consolidates data with accounting software, customer portals, and shopping carts such as woo commerce and nearly shopify.

Tall Emu customers can buy using webforms; over the phone transactions; customer portal; woo commerce; EDI and other varied ways to centralise and ship and manage customers. We’d dearly love to add Shopify to this.

During the app review process we are being rejected because we allow payment transactions by other means. For example - a customer - unrelated in any way to shopify - could make a payment transaction outside of shopify.

So my question - am I missing something? Is to 100% accurate to say that you cannot integrate anything at all with shopify unless shopify processes all transactions? Is the reviewer mistaken? Or is there a different type of integration or process we should be using.

The functionality we are trying to build is beneficial to shopify:

a) Download orders to our system so that they can be fulfilled with all of the other orders from different channels,
b) Transfer data to accounting software in full resolution - including both MYOB and Xero,
c) Sync inventory data to shopify as inventory levels change in our system.

It is possible to take a payment in our system - because for our clients shopify is not the centre of their world, but usually an add-on channel.

Can we get some advice or guidance here, because it seems odd that our use-case is prohibited.

Cheers

Mike

1 Like
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Hi Mike!

Thanks for asking this - in this case it sounds like the app reviewer you’ve been working with is correct. Apps that redirect buyers to a third-party checkout instead of the Shopify checkout are not supportable on Shopify. Do you have docs that describe the full purchasing flow that give a comprehensive view into how buyers could checkout by different methods/ payment processors?

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Hi Liam,

Thanks for the quick reply. We’re not doing any redirection of buyers to third party checkouts at all.

Let me try and describe the use-case of a typical customer, see if that helps get some clarity.

Typically - Tall Emu clients are a B2B wholesale business, with most orders being placed over the phone or by email. The customer may have account terms - usually the case - or could pay immediately by credit card.

We’ll process inventory, orders, etc via our system to get the goods where they need to be - and then send all that data to the accounting software.

None of this business process has any interaction with, or relevance to the online store (shopify or other).

The client may then decide they want an online store - maybe they have retail customers too - and so here, Shopify is obviously a good option. Maybe the client has one in place already.

In those cases - the order processing flow would be - retail customer goes to their shopify site, places an order, pays for it - and then we download and process (pick, pack, ship) and send to the client.

In this scenario there is no situation where we’re bypassing shopify payment processing in any way. There’s no redirection, no intent to redirect and no sense in redirection.

I understand you’re concerned about companies taking cash out of shopify’s pockets - but as I understood it - Shopify does’t even support a model where there is no payment at the time of sale (which is the typical B2B wholesale model) - so our usual clients would not use shopify at all.

Even in a case where shopify is a primary channel, and we’re just consolidating - we don’t provide a means to take an order from Shopify and process payment for it in any other way.

So I am a little confused as to why we’re being treated as a payment app. If anything we’re more multichannel order management, or inventory, or shipment consolidation. It is true that we can take a payment - but that ability is completely unrelated to the online store workflow.

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Hi Liam,

I would be interested in having Tall Emu linked with my shopify store. Has there been any progress made on getting the app approved? As I understood from the response from Tall Emu they are not a payment gateway. I need to have Tall emu in order to have my sales data imported into my accounting software.

Can you please have this matter escalated and looked into?