Ask your Shopify contact, in writing, exactly what evidence they want. Do that first, before you commission anything.
That is not a deflection. It is the most useful thing on this page, and the reason is specific: đź”´ Shopify publishes no route for submitting remediation. We looked. No reinstatement control list, no evidence deadline, no document template. It appears to be handled case by case and communicated privately to the affected partner.
So an email costs you nothing and is the only reliable source on your case. It beats every general recommendation, including ours.
What Shopify does publish, and why it is not a route back
đź”´ A correction to how this is usually put, including by us until today. Shopify does publish an appeal. What it does not publish is a way to submit completed remediation once an app has been delisted as an enforcement action, and conflating the two costs providers the first week. The scope of that matters: a live app inside a quality check does have a published route, with evidence and a 30 day clock, and it sits before delisting rather than after it. The reasons, the states and which route applies to each are set out in why Shopify delists an app.
The appeal appears on Shopify’s enforcement page, and its trigger is narrow: “If you believe that there has been a mistake, then you can submit an appeal by following the instructions provided in the notification.” That is a channel for disputing a finding of fact. Nothing published says it weighs remediation, and if you have accepted the finding and fixed the fault, you are not the person that sentence describes.
Two more sentences from the same page set the expectation you should actually plan against.
You may never be told what you are fixing. “to protect the privacy and security of our merchants and Partners, we can’t share specific information about an investigation unless required by law.”
And fixing it may not give you back what you had. “Even after resolving the issue, the visibility of an app could still be affected. Violations may impact your eligibility for certain Partner Programs, such as Built for Shopify.”
Read together: the fault may be undisclosed, the remediation has no published submission route, and the outcome is explicitly not a restoration of your previous position. That is the honest shape of it, and it is the reason the first email matters more than anything you commission.
Source: Enforcement of Shopify’s Partner Program Policies, read at help.shopify.com/en/partners/help-support/faq/removal on 22 October 2026. The page carries no revision date, which is worth knowing for a document this consequential. Note also that notices come from ecosystem-governance@shopify.com, which Shopify states “isn’t actively monitored”, and that “Shopify Support is unable to provide updates on these tickets”.
Check you are reading about the right suspension
Most of what a search returns will be about something else, and some of it is sold to you.
A large share of published material on Shopify suspensions, including paid services promising reinstatement, concerns merchant store suspensions under the Acceptable Use Policy. That is a different decision, taken by a different team, about a storefront rather than an app.
If your app was delisted from the App Store, you are in Partner Governance, and advice written for a suspended merchant store does not transfer. Check which one a page is describing before you act on it, and certainly before you pay for it.
Why you may have been suspended without warning
Section 7.1 of the Shopify API License and Terms of Use confirms Shopify monitors API use and may access applications to identify security issues. Check the document name when anyone quotes you a clause here: monitoring, suspension and audit live in the API Terms, not in the Partner Program Agreement, whose Sections 7 and 8 are Disclaimer of Warranty and Limitation of Liability. A review can begin without any report from you, and suspension can happen without notice, at Shopify’s sole discretion.
Before commissioning anything, work out which of the published causes applies to you, because four of the five families need no security work at all. We list them, with the route back for each, in why Shopify delists an app.
The planning consequence: the clock on a reinstatement is neither one you control nor one Shopify publishes. The moment to establish what your reviewer wants is the day you are suspended, not after a first submission comes back rejected.
Shopify does not require a penetration test, and saying otherwise is wrong
Worth stating plainly, because it is commonly misreported, including by firms selling the test.
Shopify mandates no penetration test. Not to list, not to relist. What the API Terms require is proof of compliance on request (Section 8), systems configured to Internet industry standards (Section 7.2), and a 24-hour breach notification (Section 6.2.10, with identical wording in the Partner Program Agreement), plus evidence at a Level 2 data protection review.
Testing is one way to produce that proof, and in a reinstatement it is usually the most legible way, because a reviewer outside your company can read reproducible findings with evidence attached. But it is a means, not a mandate.
The two documents, and the different questions they answer
What we can describe honestly is the shape of what an assessment has to demonstrate, because that shape is set by the reader rather than by Shopify.
| Independent Incident Report | Independent assessment | |
|---|---|---|
| Question | What happened | What is true now |
| Direction | Backward, one specific event | Forward, current attack surface |
| Source | Your own incident record: logs, timeline, change history | Live testing of the running system |
| Who writes it | An assessor independent of the build, working from your record. Nobody else has the history to supply | An assessor independent of the build |
| What convinces | An honest timeline, including the gap between compromise and detection | Reproducible findings with evidence and a recomputable severity |
| Failure mode | Vague on dates, vague on data reached, silent on how it was found | A severity label with no proof behind it |
đź”´ Keep two things apart here, because one phrase usually does both jobs and causes trouble. Your own incident record is the raw material: the logs, the timeline, the change history. The Independent Incident Report is the document written on top of it, by someone outside your build team, and that is the one a reviewer reads.
A reader takes the Independent Incident Report to understand the fault, then takes the assessment to judge whether the rest of the application looks like the same fault waiting to happen elsewhere. Answering only the first question leaves the obvious second one open.
On independence, and whose reasoning this is
🔴 Section 8 of the API Terms reserves independence for Shopify’s own appointed auditor. In no text we could find does Shopify require your assessor to be independent of your build team.
So the case for separation is ours, not a rule. An assessment written by the team that built the system and did not catch the original fault is being asked to grade its own work under deadline, and a reader outside your company has no way to weigh it. Separation is what makes a finding legible to someone who was not in your standups.
Treat that as a judgement about what convinces a reviewer, not as a requirement we are reporting.
Your own incident record: do not minimise
The pull under pressure is to shorten the exposure window, soften how it was found, and leave out that a merchant reported it before your monitoring did.
Do not. A discrepancy later discovered between your account and someone else’s telemetry teaches a reviewer something worse than the incident did. An honest detection gap with a named fix reads as a team that understands its own weakness, which is what a reviewer is actually assessing when they decide whether to trust you with protected customer data again.
Where we fit, and the line nobody can cross
We deliver the independent assessment leg: the penetration test, the report, and findings indexed against the Level 1 and Level 2 control lists so you can show where each one is touched. Where an app is in reinstatement, that comes with the incident response work the process needs. Our Shopify Partner Governance page sets out what that engagement covers.
Your own incident record stays yours. Only you hold the timeline, the logs and the change history, and only you can speak to them honestly. The Independent Incident Report is ours to write: built on your record, it states root cause, scope of impact, timeline and remediation as our assessment of what is true, which is what makes it the independent leg rather than your account restated. Both documents travel together, on the one timeline the platform asks for. You can read both as samples before deciding anything: the Shopify Partner Governance report samples are a penetration test report and an Independent Incident Report from one engagement, illustrative and with the client fictional.
đź”´ And the thing nobody can sell you: Shopify decides. Section 13.1 of the API Terms puts it in one line. No security firm sits in that decision or can commit to its outcome, and a vendor who implies otherwise has told you something useful about themselves.
The full requirement set, the sixteen Level 1 and Level 2 controls, and what listing takes in the first place are on our Shopify Partner Governance requirements guide.
Corrections and updates (2)
We publish corrections rather than editing them away, so a reader who acted on an earlier version can see what changed. Some entries record a change in the source document itself, others record our own error. Dates are our review dates, not the source's change date.
Errors in this page are corrected in place with a dated note. If you believe something here misreads the programme, tell us at errors@cybersecify.com and we will check it against the source and publish the outcome either way. Our corrections policy sets out how.
- 2026-10-21: đź”´ This page named the wrong Shopify document for every clause it cited. Monitoring, suspension, audit and proof of compliance were attributed to the Partner Program Agreement. They are in the API License and Terms of Use, whose Section 7 is Security and Section 8 is Audit; the Partner Program Agreement has no Section 7.1, and its Sections 7 and 8 are Disclaimer of Warranty and Limitation of Liability. Every requirement stated here was re-verified and none of them moved, and the 24-hour breach notification appears in both documents. What was wrong was the document name, on a page that tells readers to ask a vendor which document a control number came from. Links to both primary sources have been added.
- 2026-10-21: đź”´ This page said we could not write your incident report. That was wrong. One phrase was doing two jobs. Your own incident record, the logs, the timeline and the change history, is yours and we cannot write it. The Independent Incident Report built on it is a document we do produce, and a platform has accepted one from us alongside the test. The page now keeps the two apart.
Sources. Enforcement of Shopify’s Partner Program Policies for the appeal, the investigation-confidentiality line and the warning that visibility may stay affected after remediation, read 22 October 2026 and carrying no revision date of its own; Shopify API License and Terms of Use, Sections 6.2.10, 7.1, 7.2, 8 and 13.1; the Shopify Partner Program Agreement for the identically worded breach notification duty; and protected customer data requirements including the Level 1 and Level 2 control lists. Read 17 October 2026, document names corrected 21 October 2026. 🔴 Shopify publishes no route for submitting remediation, and no reinstatement control list, template or deadline; where this page describes what a reinstatement submission should contain, that is our view of what answers a reviewer, not a Shopify requirement.