This guide outlines how to set up a development environment for testing and integrating your app with CreatorCommerce. We’ll walk through everything from dev store setup to production testing, so your team can quickly validate functionality and prepare for co-marketing.

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🔧 Step 1: Spin Up a Shopify Development Store

Create a dedicated Shopify dev store to test your CreatorCommerce integration.

• Go to your Shopify Partners Dashboard
• Create a new development store
• Store name suggestion: creatorcommerce-{{brand-name}}.myshopify.com
  (or cc-{{brand-name}}.myshopify.com if you prefer short & sweet)
• Choose to populate the store with products for better test coverage

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📦 Step 2: Install the CreatorCommerce App + Start a Dev Subscription

Install the production version of the CreatorCommerce app onto your new dev store.

• Subscriptions on development stores incur dummy charges, so go ahead and start one
• Once installed, give us a heads up — we’ll take care of any setup or hidden feature flags on our end
• Also, connect your application instance to the store.
  • If your app isn’t accessible from within the Shopify Admin, just invite team@creatorcommerce.shop directly

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✅ Step 3: Approve Partner Store Access

We’ll request access to the dev store after install.

• Accept our Partner Access Request so we can complete integration steps
• We’ll also:
  • Install any supporting apps to help with testing
  • Set up a demo storefront to showcase how the integration works in a live-like environment

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🌐 Step 4: Share & Validate Your Staging Endpoint

Before we go live, we’ll run staging tests to ensure everything’s working as expected.

• Depending on if we'll be sharing data via web hooks to CC, or polling against your API, you/we'll share a staging endpoint (we’ll coordinate this over Slack or email)
• We’ll use this to test initial data flow between our systems
• Once both sides confirm things are working as expected, we’ll coordinate a push to production for user-based testing

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🚀 Step 5: Test in Production

Once staging is cleared, we’ll move everything into the live CreatorCommerce app, enabled only for the dev store.

• You can now stress-test user flows on the dev store with the production app
• Once we mutually approve the integration:
  • It gets officially listed in our app, docs, and partner website
  • We’ll assist in rolling it out to beta merchants for continued testing and feedback

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💬 On-Going Communication & Troubleshooting

We’re here in real time to support the integration process. You’re encouraged to:

• Spin up Slack threads or email threads for anything ongoing
• For technical questions, reach out to @Chai Pilaka
• For co-marketing, partner visibility, or merchant rollout strategy, contact @Kenyon Brown

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Let’s build something great together.