Built and shipped Blinto's first-ever Shopify App Store approval — a gift-wrap and gift-options app for Shopify merchants.
Outcome
Shipped Blinto's first-ever Shopify App Store approval, taking the company from zero apps in the marketplace to one approved, public listing during a four-month tenure.
Blinto is a Dhaka-based product company. I joined as a Full-Stack Developer in May 2023 — my first on-site, full-time engineering role — based out of the Mirpur office. The brief was direct: build Shopify apps. Blinto was new to the Shopify ecosystem and didn't have a single app live in the App Store yet.
The app let Shopify store owners offer gift wrapping, gift messages, and personalized gift options to their shoppers without writing any of it themselves. Specifically:
It was the kind of small-but-real merchant utility Shopify stores buy specifically because they don't want to build it themselves — and the kind of app where every flaw in onboarding, billing, or uninstall behaviour will be the first thing a Shopify reviewer flags.
App Store approval is a hard gate, not a deploy-and-forget. It's a multi-stage review with security checks, performance checks, billing-flow checks, mandatory GDPR webhook handlers, uninstall behaviour, session validation, and a manual reviewer who can reject for any of them. Apps routinely sit in review for weeks and come back with a list of fixes.
My job was to take the app from a working prototype to something that passed every Shopify reviewer rule, in a stack I had to learn on the job.
The app cleared review and went live in the Shopify App Store. Going from zero published apps to one published app is a different milestone than it sounds — it's the company's first proof that their engineering team can produce something Shopify trusts to put in front of merchants.
After my four-month tenure ended I moved on to FlowGPT. Some time later, Blinto delisted the app from the App Store. I include this not as a footnote but as the truth: the listing got there, it lived in the store, and the company's decision to sunset it after I left is a separate story from the one this case study is telling.