Development stores and analytics

Development stores

A development store is a free store you make from Apps > Developer console > Development stores to test your apps. You need at least one app in the Developer console first.

Any store type you can open: e-commerce, restaurant, business (and digital, where it is switched on for your account).
Optional sample data: one category with three or four items of the right kind for the store type (products, menu items, services or books), three customers and four orders with mixed statuses spread over the past two weeks. Every sample record has a name that starts with “Sample”, sample customers use @example.com addresses that never receive mail, and sample orders carry metadata.sample: true.
Up to 5 open development stores per developer. Closing one removes every app installed on it and takes its storefront offline for good.

What a development store never does:


Pay Salesive	It is on a plan that never expires and cannot buy or change a plan.
Pay out	Withdrawals are refused. It can never be an app’s payout store.
Take online payments	Its storefront offers no payment gateway, and checkout refuses one with `403` (`DEVELOPMENT_STORE`). Bank transfer details and other offline options still work, so you can test the whole order flow.
Count	It is left out of platform statistics and does not use up your one real store.
Get indexed	`robots.txt` disallows everything, the sitemap is empty, every page is `noindex`.

Installing apps on a development store

Every install on a development store is a test install:

Charges and subscriptions your app asks for are test charges. The merchant approves them and nothing is paid (see Payments).
Test installs never count toward install numbers, analytics or the marketplace, and they cannot rate apps.
When you install your own app on your development store, the install uses your app’s Development settings (dev launch URL, redirect URIs and webhook URL). You can still ask for production. Another developer’s app on your development store runs on its production settings, so you are never sent to someone else’s localhost.

API

All three need your dashboard session (they are not app token endpoints).

GET    /api/v1/apps/developer/stores
POST   /api/v1/apps/developer/stores    { "name": "Acme test", "type": "ecommerce", "sampleData": true }
DELETE /api/v1/apps/developer/stores/:id

Errors: 403 NOT_A_DEVELOPER (no app yet), 409 DEV_STORE_LIMIT (close one first).

App analytics

The Analytics card in the app editor shows, for the last 7, 30 or 90 days (UTC days):

Active installs now and at the start of the period, installs and uninstalls per day, and a daily line of active installs.
Churn: uninstalls in the period divided by the installs that were active at its start.
Ratings: the average, the count and the 1 to 5 star distribution, plus ratings left in the period.
Revenue per currency from paid charges: gross, the Salesive fee and your net. Amounts are never converted between currencies.

Test installs (development stores and review testers) and test charges are never counted.

GET /api/v1/apps/developer/:appId/analytics?days=30

days is 1 to 365 (default 30). The response has series (one row per day with installs, uninstalls, active), totals (installs, uninstalls, netGrowth, activeNow, activeAtStart, churnRate), ratings and revenue (one entry per currency with gross, platformFee, net, charges and a daily series). Install history before analytics shipped is rebuilt from each install’s first install date and last uninstall date, so older reinstalls are not visible. Active installs per day are exact for any period.