I'm not a Shopify partner, but it looks like this is nothing new or suprising, and clearly stated in their terms. Why are you suprised or pissed off? Or maybe I don't understand how exactly you use Stripe in connection to Shopify. Can you tell us more about what your app does and how you use Stripe?
Just because Apple also has everything "written down" in their terms, but Shopify CEO is pissed off by them. Also, because they're asking for the commission retroactively for any billing they have done bypassing their API.
Software has ironically only led to more and more vertical and horizontal integration while evangelists had been predicting the utopian opposite while ignoring the warning signs.
Why is it ok in software to pay a 20% - 30% commission? Imagine if your car dealer would ask an extra 30% Ok, ok I get it, it's not a physical product but still people get paid to work on it and develop it, and there are income taxes and all that, but really 20-30%?!?! If you sell a product chances are your profit margin is 20-30% and that it's good, but here in software we have to do a cut for 20-30%, well again 10%…
Off topic: How much of a revenue bonus would be enough incentive to install a specific shopify/plugin/minor-UI-tweaks addition to your store ? 3%? 10% 1%? Lets assume I can convince you we dont share your data or harm your business.
They don't understand the model where SaaS businesses use Shopify as a billing channel on top of their own subscription model, it's all or nothing - they assume that anything in the app store can only use Shopify billing if the user installs via Shopify, which is fair but their billing API has glaring issues: - App Charges get added to clients bills, you're not getting paid right away (60+ days in some cases) vs gett…
Launch on BigCommerce, where you can use your own billing, and come back and tell us how that went.
Hint: poor conversion rate because merchants need to enter their CC details, and low volume. 20% on Shopify is a steal IMO.
Commerce Layer has a business model with no revenue sharing: https://commercelayer.io/
I guess maybe you have some connection to Commerce Layer, because you've mentioned them here multiple times now. If you do, perhaps you'd like to tell them that I just visited their site and after a few minutes of reading, I still don't understand what they offer or why it might help me. The pages I saw were full of buzzwords and vague arguments, but had little substance: no high-level explanation of the scope of the product and what functionality it offers, no illustration of how the API works and where it would integrate with the rest of my system, no walk-throughs showing how to build different types of useful functionality with it, no case studies showing the benefits of switching to it. It was a frustrating experience, and they might like to do something about that.