Shopify isn't cold on messaging apps generally. It's cold on one.

From the help center on Shopify Messaging:

You can create and send email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing campaigns directly from your Shopify admin

WhatsApp gets its own documentation page. LINE appears in none of it — not among Shopify Messaging's channels, not in Campaign Autopilot's list (Shopify Messaging, Shop Campaigns, Meta Ads, Microsoft Advertising), and not in the sales channel index (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google, Amazon, Temu, Shop, Collective).

For any merchant selling into Japan, that's a zero-surface-area gap against a platform LY Corporation reports at over 100 million domestic monthly active users. Everything runs through third-party apps.

There's a second problem, and it's the one that trips up teams with budget: the widely repeated claim that a Shopify Plus store can connect LINE Login as its identity provider and replace the default sign-in. Put Shopify's requirements page next to LINE's ID token spec and it fails on two counts, both documented by the vendors themselves.

Below: what Shopify does natively, the three distinct layers people conflate when they say "LINE login," the two-tier cost model, and five real apps compared. Research date: September 1, 2026.

The short version

If you just want to broadcast to LINE, one app does it. Under a few hundred linked users, both the app and the LINE Official Account can be free.

If you want to link IDs and segment on Shopify order data, that's the apps' core competency. It works on every Shopify plan. Plus is not required.

If you want LINE to be the login on your storefront, you need Shopify Plus — and even then, "just connect it as an IdP" doesn't work. See below.

If you're budgeting, the app's monthly fee is roughly half the story. LINE Official Account fees stack on top.

By scenario:

• Bilingual team, or an overseas team running a Japan store → CRM PLUS on LINE (free to install, 100 linked users; the only one of the five with an English UI)
• Email and LINE from one tool → StoreCRM (free up to 300 active customers)
• Retail POS tied to a LINE membership barcode → Lipify ($18/mo and up for the POS tiers)
• Zero fixed cost to validate → Omise Connect (free to 50 linked users, then performance-based)

What Shopify does natively

LINE is absent from three separate official pages

Proving a negative is usually awkward. Here it's confirmable three independent ways:

Official page	Channels listed	LINE
Shopify Messaging	Email, SMS, WhatsApp	Absent
Campaign Autopilot	Shopify Messaging, Shop Campaigns, Meta Ads, Microsoft Advertising	Absent
Online sales channels	Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google, Amazon, Temu, Shop, Collective, Buy Button	Absent

The sales channel page closes with:

Other sales channels are available from third-party developers in the Shopify App Store.

Shopify has never published a reason. The verifiable claim stops at "it isn't there."

Social sign-in is Google, Facebook, and Apple

Default authentication for customer accounts is a one-time code:

They enter their email address and receive a one-time 6-digit verification code. A password isn't required to sign in.

Three things can be added on top: Sign in with Shop (if Shop Pay is active), social sign-in via Google, Facebook, or Apple, and — on Plus only — your own identity provider. The social sign-in section has exactly two setup child pages, connect Google and connect Facebook. Either way, no LINE.

Three layers people call "LINE login"

Conflating these is why so much published guidance is wrong about which plan you need.

Layer 1 — ID linking (works on every plan)

The customer authenticates with LINE, the app captures the LINE user ID, and it's attached to the Shopify customer record. Shopify sign-in itself stays on email OTP.

This is where every app lives. Shopify has no standard field on the customer object for an external social ID, so each vendor stores it in metafields. Which is exactly why all of them bill on linked-user count: CRM PLUS on LINE at 100/300/1,000/2,001+, StoreCRM at 300/500/6,000/65,000, Lipify at 120/350, Omise Connect at 50. Same constraint, same pricing shape.

Layer 2 — Multipass (Plus AND legacy accounts only)

Shopify's developer docs state two conditions, not one:

Multipass login is only available with legacy Customer accounts Your store must be on a Shopify Plus plan

That's a double gate. A Plus store that has migrated to new customer accounts loses Multipass. Any guide saying "Plus stores can use Multipass for LINE login" is silently assuming you never migrated.

Layer 3 — External IdP (Plus only, and LINE doesn't qualify as-is)

This is the part worth reading carefully.

Compare Shopify's Requirements for connecting your own identity provider against LINE's Get profile information from an ID token:

Shopify requirement	LINE's implementation	Result
OAuth 2.0 authorization code flow	Supported	Pass
PKCE (S256)	Supported	Pass
Discovery endpoint	Published	Pass
email claim	Only with the email scope, which requires an approved application	Conditional
email_verified claim, value must be true	Not present in the ID token payload spec	Fail
RP-Initiated Logout 1.0	No end_session_endpoint in the discovery document	Unconfirmed
HS256 signatures not supported	Web login returns HS256	Fail

Both failures are quoted from the vendors' own docs. LINE, on the ID token header:

For native apps, LINE SDK, or LIFF apps, ES256 (ECDSA using P-256 and SHA-256) is returned, and for web login, HS256 (HMAC using SHA-256) is returned.

Shopify, on signing:

Tokens signed with HS256 (HMAC with shared secret) aren't supported.

And Shopify lists email_verified among the required claims, with "The value for email_verified must be true." LINE's documented payload contains iss, sub, aud, exp, iat, auth_time, nonce, amr, name, picture, and email. No email_verified.

So you cannot point Shopify's IdP connection at LINE Login directly. Making it work means putting an OIDC broker (Auth0 or equivalent) in between, with LINE as the upstream, and having the broker re-issue email_verified and re-sign with a supported algorithm. That's a real project, not a settings toggle.

Consistent with this, CRM PLUS on LINE places its social-login features on the $200/month Advanced tier under a heading that reads, in translation, "the following are additional features available on Shopify Plus."

The cost is always two-tier

The LINE Messaging API itself is free. But every Push, Multicast, Broadcast, and Narrowcast message consumes your LINE Official Account message quota. Four things are exempt: LINE Chat messages, auto-response messages, greeting messages, and the Reply API.

LINE Official Account pricing as published on September 1, 2026 (excluding tax):

Plan	Monthly fee	Included messages	Additional messages
Communication	¥0	200	Not available
Light	¥5,000	5,000	Not available
Standard	¥15,000	30,000	Metered

Messages are counted as sends × recipients. Three bubbles in one send still counts as one message per recipient. So 3,000 friends × two sends a month is 6,000 messages — past the Light plan, into Standard.

Friends	Sends/month	Messages	LINE Official Account	App tier	Rough total
80	2	160	¥0	Free	¥0
800	4	3,200	¥5,000	$10–30	~¥6,500–9,500
3,000	2	6,000	¥15,000	$100–200	~¥30,000–45,000

(App fees converted at ¥150/USD. Every Shopify app on this list bills in USD.)

At 3,000 friends, LINE's side costs as much as or more than the app. Budget from the app's list price alone and you'll be off by roughly half. Worse, growth pushes you up both ladders at once — linked users on the app side, message volume on LINE's.

Rates change on October 1, 2026

One more thing no comparison post has absorbed yet. From LY Corporation's notice dated February 16, 2026:

We will revise additional message pricing on October 1, 2026. The countries and regions subject to this revision are Japan only. Usage up to 200,000 messages/month will be ¥3 per message, and additional messages beyond 200,000 will be ¥2.5 per message.

The current structure tiers down: ¥3 for the first 50,000, ¥2.8 for the next 50,000, ¥2.6 for the next 100,000. Flattening to ¥3 up to 200,000 is an effective price increase for anyone sending between roughly 50,000 and 200,000 messages a month.

Caps move too. The maximum available through an approved cap-increase request becomes 3.59 million, and accounts currently configured above 3.59 million will be lowered to that figure from October 2026. LY Corporation's notice warns that the same message-count setting may now produce a higher spending ceiling than before.

If you send at volume, revisit your send design before October rather than after.

Five LINE apps compared

Values from each Shopify App Store listing on September 1, 2026. None of the five carries a Built for Shopify badge.

App	Developer	Free plan	From	Top tier	Rating (reviews)	Languages
CRM PLUS on LINE	Social PLUS Inc.	Yes (100 linked users)	$10/mo	$200/mo + metered	5.0 (37)	Japanese, English
StoreCRM	GroovyMedia Inc.	Yes (300 active customers)	$9/mo	$100/mo + metered	5.0 (16)	Japanese only
Lipify	d2c-square.com	Yes (120 linked users)	$9/mo	$27/mo	4.7 (3)	Japanese only
Omise Connect	FreakOut Holdings, inc.	Yes (50 linked users)	Performance-based	Performance-based	3.0 (1)	Japanese only
Smartarget Line ‑ Contact Us	Smartarget	Yes (homepage only)	$9/mo	$9/mo	4.7 (6)	No Japanese

CRM PLUS on LINE

Tiers are cut on linked-user count: free to install (100), Entry $10 (300), Growth $30 (1,000), Advanced $200 (metered above 2,001). Every tier includes ID linking, checkout reminders, segmented sends driven by Shopify customer and order data, step campaigns, Shopify Flow integration, and tabbed rich menus.

What the $200 Advanced tier unlocks is social login, automatic friend-add via LINE Login, and a LINE mini-app membership card — all explicitly gated on Shopify Plus.

It's the only one of the five with an English UI, which makes it the default choice if the people operating the store don't read Japanese. It's also featured in Shopify's own "Discover apps to grow your Japanese business" story.

StoreCRM

Structurally an email CRM with LINE bolted on: 25+ automated scenarios, segmented sends, and back-in-stock alerts in one app. The free tier covers 300 "active customers," defined as marketing-consented customers or LINE-linked customers.

Four tiers: free, StoreCRM for LINE at $9 (500 LINE-linked customers), Standard at $15 (500 active customers), Pro at $100 (6,000). Above 65,000 you're moved to enterprise automatically. Note that $9 and $15 count different things — linked customers versus active customers — so the tiers aren't a simple ladder.

Read the fine print on the $9 tier: back-in-stock notifications and similar features are noted as available from $65 and up, even below 5,000 linked customers. If restock alerts are why you're installing it, $65 is your real entry price, not $9.

Lipify

The only one integrating with Shopify POS and Smaregi. The pitch is scanning a QR code in-store, creating the Shopify account, and issuing a LINE membership barcode in one step. The listing states plainly that it works on plans other than Shopify Plus.

Pricing splits into two families — online store and POS — and they invert: the POS Entry tier ($18) covers 120 linked IDs while the online-store Starter tier ($9) covers 350. Cheaper gets you more headroom unless POS is a hard requirement.

Three reviews, all from 2024.

Omise Connect

One listed plan: free to 50 linked IDs, and beyond that, charges apply only when an order results from a targeting message. The rate isn't published on the App Store listing.

Its single review (March 2025, three stars) reports that restock notifications evaluate stock across all locations combined, making it unusable for merchants managing retail and ecommerce inventory separately. The developer's reply confirms the behavior and says a location-aware update was under consideration. Whether that shipped is unverified as of September 2026 — ask before installing if you run OMO.

Smartarget Line ‑ Contact Us

It surfaces in "LINE integration app" searches, but all it does is place a LINE chat button on your storefront. No ID linking, no broadcasting, no automation, and no Japanese UI. Useful to know so you don't put it in the same comparison row as the others.

Where this leaves you

Native support is zero, and confirmable three ways. With WhatsApp already standardized, the asymmetry isn't going to resolve on its own.

ID linking and broadcasting are fully solved by apps on any plan. Since every vendor bills on linked users, the number to compare isn't the monthly fee — it's which tier your realistic linked-user count lands in.

Making LINE the actual login is hard even on Plus. Multipass is legacy-accounts-only; the IdP route fails on email_verified and on HS256. If that's the goal, get the vendor's supported architecture and plan requirements in writing before you sign.

And budget both floors. Between the two-tier structure and the October 2026 rate change, merchants sending at volume will get more from redesigning their send strategy than from switching apps.

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All figures verified September 1, 2026 against the Shopify Help Center, Shopify developer documentation, LINE Developers, LINE Yahoo for Business, and Shopify App Store listings. Pricing, ratings, and review counts change — check current sources before installing.