merchant-pain-preventionlisted

# Merchant Pain Prevention Every 1-star review on the Shopify App Store is a merchant who trusted you and felt betrayed. This skill is the inverse of that experience — a hard-coded inventory of the patterns that cause the betrayal, with the structural fixes. The merchant pain ecosystem is small and loud. Stores talk. Subreddits index. Community threads outrank the App Store on Google for the phrase "billed for uninstalled app" — there are at least eight active threads on that exact phrase. If you ship a billable app and get one of those patterns wrong, you will not just lose that merchant; you will repel the next 50 who Google your name. This is not a style guide. It is a survival document. Follow it. --- ## 1. When to use Invoke this skill whenever you are: - **Designing** a new Shopify app or extension — before architecture is locked, before scopes are declared, before billing is wired. - **Reviewing a PR** that touches: theme app extensions, ScriptTag, billing API, webhook handlers, scopes (`shopify.app.toml`), onboarding flow, cancellation flow, email triggers, popups, banners, countdown timers, "social proof" widgets. - **Pre-ship audit** — the 48 hours before you submit to the App Store or release a new version. - **Triaging a merchant complaint** — public 1-star, support ticket, refund request, chargeback, BBB complaint, Trustpilot drop, Reddit post that mentions your app by name. - **Annual reaudit** — quarterly is better. Scopes accrete. Pricing pages drift. A