Horizon inside Shopify admin

Horizon runs inside Shopify admin as an embedded app at /shopify/embedded. It is the same product, in a frame, with a few differences that come from living inside someone else’s admin.

Signing in

You do not. Shopify vouches for you. The embedded app takes its identity from Shopify itself, so there is no sign-in form and no password to remember.

For the same reason there is no “Sign out” in the embedded app. Closing it in Shopify admin is all there is to do, and a sign-out button would have nothing to end.

What you get

Once the app has established who you are, you get the ordinary Control Tower shell, with the same sidebar and the same pages described in the rest of this guide.

A newly installed store lands in the guided setup funnel first, so the first run walks through connecting things rather than dropping the merchant into an empty app.

Billing is Shopify’s

A store that needs a plan sees a Shopify paywall, not the card form. The plan and the price are approved on Shopify’s side, and Shopify bills them.

That follows through everywhere: plan changes and cancellation happen on Shopify, invoices are in the Shopify admin under its own billing section, and the app says so rather than offering buttons that would not work. The usage panel also explains the constraints that come with being billed by Shopify.

When an action is refused

Refusals get their own card inside the frame rather than a wall of errors. If your plan does not include another connected storefront, for example, the card says so and offers the upgrade route where one exists.

Navigation inside the frame

Moving between pages inside the embedded app goes through the shell rather than through the browser address bar. A full page load would restart the frame and lose your place, so links within the app are built to avoid one.

This is worth knowing if you are following an instruction from elsewhere in this guide that says to open a particular address: inside Shopify admin, navigate using the sidebar instead.

Two-factor authentication

If a policy requires a second factor, the embedded app asks you to set one up in the frame, the same way the standalone app does.

Connecting the store in the first place

Installing from the Shopify App Store is one route in. Connecting an existing store from inside Horizon is the other. See Connect a store.