> I’m trying to get him to switch to an open-source alternative.

Well if you want an argument in favor between terrible support, glitchy software, huge price hikes, and so on we aren't particularly happy with Shopify either...

Are these legal in the place they are selling? Or is it against shopify TOS to do so? These two I am not surprised.

>will unpublish products without even telling you.

Giving some benefits of doubt here first. May be someone could explain the rationale behind it. Because on the surface this seems wrong.

Shopify runs a payment network called Shop Pay, and that network has relationships with the credit card companies like Visa. Honestly how do you expect to transact in goods that almost nobody will do business in? Even if you have the listing, what supported Shopify payment system will do the business?

He can vibecode a full Shopify app but not a bash script that uploads it to his Partner Dashboard? I'll admit it's difficult to distribute custom apps widely, but for internal use it's like one TOML file, 3 lines of bash then copy-pasting a link.

> Their ideal situation is an Apple like walled garden where you can only install apps from their store.

On the flip side, like Apple, is that they have a customer base that is actually happy to pay for apps.