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In between self-congratulatory “great job” updates from Harley, Shopify also communicated a number of updates and non-updates to its partners.  I read most of the recaps of the event and even participated in listening and came away with three impressions:

First, Shopify continues to march to the beat of its own drummer;  in 2026, we are talking about developers not being notified about API updates.  If this happened to Tobi in an open-source framework he contributed to, he would be furious.  Yet, in his own company, the behavior gets a pass.

Keep in mind, I started my career as a developer.  In 2001, we sat in meetings with eBay, where Greg Isaacs and his team were better at updating developers on changes than Shopify is today.  It’s not hard.  It can even be automated in AI.

The question is, why is it so hard for Shopify?  The answer to me is simple - they excuse the behavior for “brand effect.”  If they are breaking your APIs, then they are not being careless, oh no! Instead, they are moving fast!  It’s an intentional brand attribute.

But keep in mind, there is the other side of the coin to moving fast, and as a company with designs on being a hyperscaler in the future, carelessness is not a brand attribute you want to be known for.  

As long as numbers are going up and to the right, no one cares. Of course, this kind of documentation could be automated.  It reads to me more like a refusal to automate it. AI first anyone?

Second, one productive update was a move to pay partners faster; this is, for sure, a welcome change.

Finally, I did want to comment on another discussion about App Store submission times, as well as the explosion of app submissions to the Shopify App Store that are obviously AI slop-coded nonsense.

Here’s my take - Shopify’s App Store is an incumbent’s game now, and the whole operation is becoming increasingly irrelevant. A wasteland. If you once viewed it as a high-priority way to gain customers as a new entrant, that advantage is now over.  No one cares how many apps are in the Shopify App Store. I still feel that Shopify has an advantage due to its merchant growth, but increasingly, the advantage is not ecosystem-based. And that’s significant on its own. 

Perhaps Shopify should just get rid of its App Store altogether?  I don’t think the old structure works anymore, and it hasn’t worked the past few years.  It seems to me that it rewards the apps that used to be great? Like so many apps that I used to know. The apps you really need should be automatically installed by default, or just be recommended by AI.

If you build on Shopify, sell through Shopify, or compete with anyone who does, the way Shopify treats its partners is a leading indicator of how much control you actually have over your own business as a vendor.

The U.S. Postal Service is asking the Postal Regulatory Commission to approve an 8% parcel surcharge — Priority Mail Express, Priority Mail, Ground Advantage, and Parcel Select — effective April 26th through January 2027. First time in USPS history. The trigger is fuel: gasoline near four dollars a gallon, diesel moving in the same direction, both driven by the U.S.-Israeli military action in Iran.

Compare that to Amazon, which recently imposed a 3.5% surcharge on its own carrier network. The delta — 4.5 percentage points — is not a rounding error. In logistics, pennies are margin. That gap reflects years of Amazon systematically rebuilding its fulfillment and inbound network around regionalization. Lower cost structure, lower surcharge. The math is not complicated.

UPS has raised its fuel surcharge table three times this year. FedEx has added Middle East fees. The entire carrier stack is repricing simultaneously.

For shippers running volume through USPS Ground Advantage or Parcel Select: your April 26th costs are going up, pending approval.

The harder question is January 2027. USPS calls this temporary. But a carrier that has never charged a fuel surcharge just built the mechanism. Temporary rarely means temporary in logistics pricing.

If you ship parcels through USPS, your costs go up April 26th — and the carrier that just discovered fuel surcharges is unlikely to forget them when fuel gets cheaper.

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