Frequently asked questions

We’re proponents of the tenets of flexible commerce, and our platform is built around those ideas.

This means we’re laser focused on the requirements of successful brands who need tools that can rapidly adapt to the demands of their customers and business, rather than asking them to shoehorn their business model into an existing product.

It depends on the features you need.

Submarine currently supports Stripe, Braintree, Cybersource, Paypal, Klarna, and Windcave via our own Submarine gateway, which is installed as an additional gateway on your Shopify store and is available for all products on the platform.

Shopify Payments, Stripe, and Authorize.net are supported via their native Shopify integrations for our presale and crowdfunding products only.

Pretty darn secure.

We conform to industry standards for web application security.

Submarine is built by an engineering team with extensive experience developing, deploying and managing web applications in a secure environment. We are members of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and aim to meet Level 2 standards of the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS).

Yes.

Customer payment information never passes directly to Submarine.

All sensitive payment details are sent directly from the Shopify Plus Checkout to the merchants' payment processor, after which a tokenised version of the payment method is created and passed back to Submarine.

A minimum of USD$500 per month.

Check out our pricing page for details.

We don't offer a contractual SLA or uptime guarantee.

‍Because Submarine is tightly integrated with Shopify Plus (which does not provide a formal SLA or uptime guarantee), we are unable to provide either of those things.

The way Submarine is architected, any outages on the Submarine side will not prevent customers from completing orders or cause data loss.

Yes.
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Submarine supports flexible approaches to both discount code and Shopify Script driven discounts that can be customised on a per merchant basis.

A team with extensive experience in the ecommerce and Shopify space.

You can learn more about us here.

Yes, to the extent needed for the operation of the platform.

We try to minimise the amount of customer data stored within Submarine to reduce the risk footprint for merchants. However, the nature of the platform requires that some customer information (customer IDs, customer email addresses, customer order contents, and customer addresses) are stored within Submarine.

Never.

All customer data within the platform remains the property of the merchant and will never be shared or sold to third parties. A guarantee to this effect forms part of the standard Submarine contract terms.

Yes (securely).

‍All Submarine data is periodically backed up off-site (using Tarsnap, a highly secure encrypted backup service used by many companies handling sensitive information including Stripe).

Tarsnap ensures that data is fully encrypted on our servers before transmission.

Yes.
Disco Labs has developed a template DRP that can be tailored to each merchant using the platform.

Yes.
As with our DRP, Disco Labs has developed a template BCP that can be tailored to each merchant using the platform.

On Digital Ocean in the United States.
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Our infrastructure is provided by Digital Ocean, with availability regions within the United States.
Locating our servers in the United States was a decision made based on proximity to Shopify's servers and to the majority of our merchants' customer bases.

We have the ability to deploy Submarine to alternate regions or to in-house infrastructure if merchants have specific legal or compliance needs.

Yes.

Just like Shopify Plus, Submarine's servers are multi-tenant by default (meaning we service multiple merchants from the same servers).

We have the ability to deploy Submarine to single-tenant infrastructure if merchants have specific legal or compliance needs.

Yes.

Submarine has a fully-functional staging environment, and we encourage all merchants to set Submarine up on a development or staging Shopify store for testing and development purposes. In the staging environment, sandbox payment provider credentials can be used during testing.

Yes - we've handled high traffic launch events in the past.

Submarine's architecture makes it well-suited to handle high traffic events and merchants processing large volumes. Unlike some other payment or subscription solutions, Submarine is integrated natively into the Shopify checkout, which is able to automatically scale to handle very high traffic volumes, even in cases of flash sale or launch events.