Shopify App VAPT FAQ: Delisting, Incident Reports and Retesting

Follow the wording of your own notice. If Shopify asks for both, treat them as separate deliverables unless the reviewer clarifies otherwise. An Incident Report explains what happened using available evidence, including the timeline, confirmed impact, containment, corrective actions and investigation limits. VAPT evaluates exploitable weaknesses within an agreed scope at the time of assessment. Neither automatically answers all the questions addressed by the other.

Create a requirement tracker before commissioning work: requested document, responsible person, evidence needed, planned delivery and current status. A vulnerability scan, proposal or developer statement that changes were deployed does not establish that the requested independent assessment is complete. Where the expected scope is unclear, seek clarification through the governance correspondence instead of guessing a universal Shopify format.

Do not infer a universal requirement from another app’s security notice or a vendor’s service page. Shopify publishes App Store requirements and developer security guidance; a particular governance request can add notice-specific deliverables. The owner-supplied case on Scantra’s existing service page included third-party VAPT and incident reports, but that evidence describes one engagement, not every app’s obligations.

Read the exact request for your app, including assessor conditions, deadlines and supporting documents. If a candidate says a specific accreditation is mandatory, ask for the platform source or the requirement in your notice. A supplier’s qualification, company certification and testing methodology are different things. Preserve the reviewer’s instructions and compare each proposal against those instructions rather than accepting an unsupported requirement claim.

Scope the application and its relevant backend, not just the public marketing website. Depending on architecture and authorization, the assessment can examine merchant isolation, object-level authorization, authentication, OAuth installation flows, session boundaries, token handling, backend APIs, webhook processing and sensitive business actions. The assessor should explain which surfaces are included and why they matter to your app.

Use permitted stores, accounts and synthetic data to test boundaries safely. Define environments, roles, target ownership and excluded activities in writing. Your permission to test your application does not authorize attacks on Shopify infrastructure or another merchant’s systems. Record limitations where an endpoint or workflow cannot be assessed. Coverage statements should reflect work actually performed rather than a generic checklist pasted into a report.

Ask who performs the work, who signs the report and which relationships could affect independence. Confirm whether the assessor developed the affected controls or will subcontract testing. Request substantiated qualifications and a permissioned redacted sample or illustrative report outline. Look for precise scope, validated findings, reproduction evidence, impact reasoning, remediation guidance and explicitly stated limitations.

Compare candidates using the same redacted notice and asset inventory. Discuss app-specific merchant boundaries and API workflows, not only scanner output. Clarify communication, access handling, retest coverage and commercial terms. Do not choose on a guaranteed relisting claim: Shopify controls its review. The separate vendor-evaluation guide linked from the blog provides a fuller checklist without implying Shopify endorsement of Scantra or any other provider.

Include evidence supporting the incident timeline, affected systems, confirmed impact, root cause where established, containment and corrective actions. Connect significant statements to controlled references. Preserve original logs and exports, and distinguish observations from hypotheses. If records expired or instrumentation was incomplete, explain which conclusions remain limited rather than treating the absence of evidence as proof of no activity.

An incident timeline should preserve source timestamps, document timezone conversion and separate event time from detection and response time. Redact working copies while protecting original evidence. The incident-report working template and evidence-register guides provide practical structures, not official Shopify templates. Investigation findings depend on the actual records and access available; current penetration testing alone cannot reconstruct every historical incident fact.

Map each finding to its developer action, deployed version, relevant configuration and verification evidence. Keep planned, deployed and independently verified states distinct. Retesting should identify the original finding, tested environment, accounts or roles, release and result. If access is unavailable or coverage is incomplete, say that verification was not completed rather than silently marking the issue closed.

Agree retest scope and terms before work begins. Clarify whether it covers only original conditions, closely related bypasses or broader regression checks. A successful retest of selected findings does not prove the whole app is vulnerability-free or establish what happened during the incident. Keep original findings and retest history traceable, and report open or partially fixed issues honestly in the governance response.

Start timing depends on scope, assessor availability, authorized access, app installation state, available evidence and developer readiness. Include the response deadline from your own notice, not a historical date from a case study. Distinguish an acknowledgement deadline from the work required to complete investigation, testing and remediation. Confirm achievable milestones after those dependencies are reviewed.

No assessor can guarantee Shopify approval or relisting. Scantra’s protected service page contains an anonymised owner-supported recovery example; its past outcome is not a standard turnaround or assurance for another app. Shopify retains the final decision. If a milestone changes, explain the dependency and revise the plan through the requested channel instead of promising a date that the technical team cannot support.

Scantra Security can discuss independent Shopify app VAPT, available incident evidence, remediation guidance, retesting and scoped documentation support. Begin with your app URL, a redacted governance notice, the requested reports, current situation and any deadline. The existing notice intake leads to triage and scoping before a proposal; it is not a promise of instant or round-the-clock incident response.

Do not put passwords, live access tokens, merchant personal data or unrestricted incident archives into a public enquiry form. Agree a controlled handoff for sensitive material after the scope is understood. If an incident is active, continue your established containment procedures and obtain appropriate technical and legal advice. Use the existing delisting response guide for immediate planning and the six evidence guides for the detailed next step.