Show a notification on a merchant's admin home page for partner-friendly app

Retired Boards Appdev Extensions

Topic summary

Goal: Display an in-admin notification for a partner-friendly app (LAI Reviews) once a development store switches to a paid Shopify plan. Partner-friendly apps are free to test on development stores, with regular charges after upgrade.

Constraints: Admin UI customization is limited. App extensions only work at predefined “extension points” and cannot create custom notifications on the merchant’s admin home page.

Suggested approaches:

  • Use transactional emails for onboarding and post-upgrade messaging to merchants.
  • Subscribe to the SHOP_UPDATE webhook to detect shop changes (e.g., plan upgrades), then handle logic to identify plan changes and trigger appropriate communication.

Follow-up: The requester asked if extension points could send a Loox-like dashboard notification. Clarification: No; extension points are predefined and specific, and don’t support arbitrary admin notifications.

Status: No direct method to inject custom admin notifications. The proposed path is webhook-based detection plus transactional emails. The requester plans to try both suggestions and report back; discussion remains open.

Notes: Screenshots of desired admin notifications are illustrative but not achievable via app extensions under current Shopify limitations.

Summarized with AI on March 1. AI used: gpt-5.
3

I haven’t tested this myself yet, but we are planning to do this too so it’s on the product backlog.

My initial thought would be to subscribe to the SHOP_UPDATE webhook for each store that installs your app I suspect it will be triggered on a plan change, so you just need to then write the logic to parse the notification and see if it is related to the shop plan.

I’ve pasted the URL to the docs below.

Let us know hi you go!

https://shopify.dev/api/admin/graphql/reference/events/webhooksubscriptiontopic