I will quickly add that in addition to raising my concerns over on the FB partners group, I totally agree with @Nesters and it’s a major pain point for me going forward with Shopify.
I’ve put a good 6 weeks in to developing a design system targeted at ReactJS based SSRs such as Gatsby or Next exactly because I wanted to provide a storefront solution that has less limitations for merchants. One of the options there is for checkout to bypass Shopify’s checkout completely because let’s face it people - if you have a storefront like it’s 2019 and then you redirect to a checkout that’s like 2014 and on top of that it’s on a different URL because you can’t frame it in to your PWA app… well I am short of civil words to describe this situation. It is not nice!
Look, I get it that you want to keep transactions revenues and I am totally okay with that and so is anyone signing up for Shopify. That’s not really the issue or motivation to bypass checkout.
The reason to bypass Shopify checkout is you are NOT listening and from what I can tell from 2013 onward backlogs in these forums have staunchly held position that Shopify checkout is optimal and if you believe it isn’t “look at your Plus plan”.
- Please clarify what @Nesters already mentions - is it okay for merchants to bypass Shopify checkout on their own behalf without partner / dev intervention?
- Please clarify what this means “Partners cannot bypass Shopify checkout unless authorized by Shopify in writing.” - in particular the circumstances of getting authorisation from Shopify to bypass checkout?
- Please do not make assumptions about checkout and what’s best for merchants. Yes you have your numbers to backup your claims and I am sure that checkout, as is, is very effective. But put that in to a completely bespoke and highly branded storefront theme, possibly not even based on Liquid or served by Shopify, and that “highly effective” checkout suddenly sticks out like a massive UX blunder. Open up checkout customisation for all plans.
- Please complete API checkout - no, webUrl to complete payment step is not good enough for all the reasons mentioned above. Imagine the agony of doing a mobile app and having to load a web view just so we can load that checkout step? You guys surely know that web view on some mobile platforms is quite ineffective. Not to mention the horrid UX when your customer gets kicked out of a stunning native UI experience in to that checkout web view.
So yes, guys & gals, you have my support and all if you wish to forbid bypassing Shopify checkout - but please allow us to use it properly first!