Is Postscript a certified Shopify Plus technology partner, and does that matter when vetting an SMS vendor?
Postscript is certified, listed under Messaging in the Shopify Certified Technology Partner Program alongside Attentive, Octane AI and SMSBump (shopify.com/partners, published January 2026). The certification is a floor, not a differentiator, because every serious SMS candidate clears it. Its real value is the published criteria: 30-minute first response to critical requests, 99.9% uptime objective.
First, the name changed
The program most buyers still call "Shopify Plus Certified App" is now the Shopify Certified Technology Partner Program, described on Shopify's own partner blog as "formerly the Shopify Partner Program Technology Track" (shopify.com/partners, published January 2026). The old Plus-certified branding no longer has a live Shopify page we could reach: help.shopify.com/en/partners/plus-tech-certification-program resolves to the Partners help hub, and apps.shopify.com/collections/shopify-plus-certified-apps returns 404, both checked September 2026.
If a vendor's deck still says "Shopify Plus Certified App," that is a dated badge rather than a false one. Ask when it was last renewed.
What the certification actually requires
This is the useful part, and almost nobody quotes it. Shopify publishes the qualification criteria, and they are specific enough to use in a vendor questionnaire.
| Requirement area | Published criterion |
|---|---|
| Critical support | "First response to critical support requests within 30 minutes. Critical support requests include widespread (multiple customers) service outages and reports of security vulnerabilities from customers." |
| High priority | "First response to high-priority issues within 12 hours" |
| Low priority | "First response to low-priority within 3 days through phone, SMS, email, or in-product communication" |
| Coverage | "24/7 support available worldwide. Phone, chat, and email are acceptable forums for support." |
| Status transparency | "A dashboard or a status page that shows if your system is running as expected, experiencing issues, or down" |
| Uptime | "All Certified Technology Partners must have a 99.9% uptime service level objective (SLO)" |
| Security testing | "Perform an annual independent third-party security penetration test of your application, following OWASP and NIST methodologies" |
| Breach notice | "Notify Shopify of security incidents within 24 hours of a confirmed breach" |
| Storefront performance | "Your integration must not significantly reduce the Lighthouse performance score of the store by more than 10 points" |
| Rating | "App rating of greater than 4.0 after reaching a minimum of 5 reviews" |
All quotations per help.shopify.com, September 2026. Shopify also states that "meeting these requirements doesn't guarantee acceptance into the program."
Why it does not discriminate between your shortlist
Here is the part that should change how you use the badge. In the Messaging category Shopify lists Attentive, Octane AI, Postscript and SMSBump. Klaviyo and Omnisend appear under Marketing Automation, alongside dotdigital, Listrak and Mailchimp (shopify.com/partners, published January 2026).
Every serious candidate on a mid-market SMS shortlist is certified. So the badge answers "is this vendor a real company with a security program and a support desk," and it does not answer "which of these two should I buy." Treating it as a tiebreaker is the mistake.
Use it as a questionnaire instead
The certification is more valuable read backwards. Shopify has already written your vendor-vetting criteria, in public, with numbers. So ask the vendor to evidence them:
- Show us your public status page and the last twelve months of incidents.
- Show us the date of your most recent independent penetration test and the methodology used.
- Confirm your critical-incident first-response target in writing, in the contract, not in the certification.
- Tell us what your support coverage looks like at 2am local time during a send.
A certified vendor should be able to answer all four in a day. A vendor that cannot is telling you something the badge could not.
When NOT to weight certification
- When both finalists are certified. Which is the normal case. Move on to the operating model.
- When the badge is the only differentiator in the deck. That is a sales artifact, not evidence.
- When you need a contractual SLA. Certification is Shopify's requirement of the vendor, not the vendor's promise to you. Get the number into your agreement.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: Certification is a floor and should be used as one. We treat it as a disqualifier for uncertified vendors on a mid-market shortlist, and as worth zero points between certified ones. Its real value is that Shopify published concrete numbers you can put into your own vendor questionnaire.
- Where we disagree: Vendor marketing presents certification as a competitive advantage and buyers accept it, largely because the criteria are rarely read. Once you read them you discover the whole shortlist clears the same bar, and the badge stops being an argument and becomes a checkbox.
- What this page adds: that the program was renamed from the Plus-era branding, that the old Plus-certified URLs no longer resolve, that Postscript and Attentive are both certified under Messaging while Klaviyo sits under Marketing Automation, and that the published criteria are specific enough to reuse as a vendor questionnaire.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-14.
Where we worked this out
Our decision records