I suspect that the major players negotiate exceptions. I don't for a second believe that the large companies you see on the Shopify App Store pay their 20% cut. They would never agree to that.
I do agree that this will lead to a regression and force app developers into using Private/Custom apps, making for a worse and less secure experience for Shopify customers.
So if I have a BigCommerce store and you only support Shopify you just wouldn't get my sale, right? By supporting multiple platforms you're increasing the pool pf potential customers, not increasing the percent you pay.
Or am I misunderstanding how you arrived at 40%?
If you make a sale on BigCommerce then they take their 20%, but a separate sale on Shopify should only be 20%. The only way that you'd end up paying 40% total is if both platforms take their cut for the same sale. Is this how each sale is structured?
For example, if I make an app that manages your product data on Shopify and BigCommerce for $100 per month. Shopify forces me to pay them $20, and BigCommerce forces me to pay them $20. I am only making $60 now.
If I want to support 6 platforms that have this pricing model, I now have to pay them a combined 120% of whatever I charge for my app!? Workarounds to this are using private apps so that to Shopify it looks like the Shopify Storefront owner built their own custom integration, or potentially breaking your software into a bunch of tiny separately billed components, both of which are a bad experience and a waste of resources (These options are also probably against the Shopify ToS).
Any other people affected by this here?
We offer an integration with Shopify for a subset of our users (~5%) and while they love the integration, it's not relevant to the other 95% of users... which means it would make no sense maintaining separate Billing code for a small subset of our users that see the integration with Shopify as one feature of our SaaS.
It seems like we're only left with the option to deprecate. Which is a lose-lose-lose: We lose customers. Shopify loses an integration. And the customers lose this utility.