Agencies and development stores
If you’re an agency or a developer building an optician’s store for a client, you’ll usually start on a Shopify Partners development store. Optical Form is built with that path in mind. Here’s what changes compared with a regular store, and what doesn’t.
Pro costs nothing on a development store
Section titled “Pro costs nothing on a development store”Shopify lets developers test apps on their development stores without paying the subscription, and Optical Form has that option switched on. When you click View plans & pricing inside the app, Shopify’s page offers Pro at $0: approve it and you have a real subscription, with no charge and no expiry for as long as the store remains a development store.
There’s no trial clock to watch and no card to enter. It’s the same app, with everything Pro does.
The 14-day welcome window applies here too
Section titled “The 14-day welcome window applies here too”As on any store, installing gives you 14 welcome days with the full app and no plan chosen. On a development store that has one practical consequence: if you don’t pick the free Pro plan, on day 14 the configurators switch off just the same, in the middle of your work. Pick it on day one and forget the calendar.
When you move to the client’s store
Section titled “When you move to the client’s store”The development store and the live store are two different stores to Shopify, so the app is installed again on the client’s store, from the App Store. That’s where a plan is chosen and the charge approved: the 14-day free trial starts that day, not the day you installed on the development store. Your client can cancel before it ends and pay nothing.
To carry your work over, export each form as JSON from its Settings tab and import it on the live store. One detail: add-ons and accessories point to products of the store where they were created, so after importing, review those links and point them at the client’s products. See Copying a form.
Theme settings — the app embed and the button block — don’t travel either: you switch them on again in the client’s theme. The Setup guide on the Home detects it and flags it for you.
What you can test on a development store
Section titled “What you can test on a development store”The whole shopper journey, checkout included: development stores accept test orders through Shopify’s test gateway, so you can see how the prescription reaches the order and the confirmation email before a real customer exists. The only thing you can’t do is take real money.
Your theme
Section titled “Your theme”Optical Form works on any Online Store 2.0 theme, but the cart is drawn by the theme, and that’s where themes differ. Start with Tested themes: if the client’s theme is there, you’ll find what to adjust and the CSS already measured.
If it isn’t, send support@getoptical.app a theme preview link with the form active on a product page. With that we measure how that theme draws the cart and send you back the recipe — what to change in the embed settings and which CSS to paste — before it goes live. It’s what we do with every new theme, and it’s better done early than late.
If something doesn’t fit
Section titled “If something doesn’t fit”Write to us. An agency that builds opticians’ stores matters a lot more to us than a one-off install, and integration questions get fast answers.