Made of Sundays review for Shop

March 29, 2023

The Shop app has some good aspects to it, but in our case its absolutely useless as Shopify has decided to not allow shops who at any point has received IP claims to join. I understand the general idea of this and the intention to keep copies out from Shop, but as a side effect it also shuts out sellers who have been targeted by claims without legal basis like in our case. This policy also apparently does not have an expiry date, so it's enough you have one claim, no matter how old it is. By doing this Shopify basically takes the side of the claimant, no matter how unfounded and unjust the claim in itself would be. Like always the side effect with blanket policies like this one is that there will be a lot of non-deserving merchants affected by this, and there is nothing you as a seller can do about it. The only way to solve this would be to take the issue to actual court, which obviously is beyond the possibilities for many small merchants around the world like ourselves. I find this policy and it's enforcement so unjust that it would be impossible to rate this app with more stars. What makes this policy even more absurd is that it only applies to the actual shop which received the claim and not the company. So we have two instalments of our shop for different markets, and one can join Shop while the other can not. That means that if you really would be a business operating in bad faith you can simply just set up a new shop to circumvent this if needed be. The reason I give this channel two stars instead of one is that it actually offers some ok features and works fairly smooth - if you are accepted that is. You can of course use some of it's features even if you are not eligible to sell on Shop, but it's still a bit of a slap in the face for any merchant who actually would like to list their products but are not able to due to blanket policies like this which is enforced without exceptions. --------------- EDIT: 29.3. Shopify posted their standard answer to this, which helps nothing. We have discussed this issue extensively with both Shopify Shop support and legal, and like mentioned above the only solution would be to take this case to US court and have the claim removed that way. Shopify Shop support agrees that this is an unfair situation, but can do nothing except ask you to contact legal - and legal only replies that they do not offer legal advice. The optimal solution to this would be to offer merchants who feel unjustly treated some kind of a channel to dispute the claim within Shopify (other than going to court), and that way at least get access to the full Shop experience on a case-by-case basis.