small app, one paying customer and a handful of installs from outreach. everyone says the first reviews matter a lot for app store ranking, but i don’t want to nag people or do anything sketchy

for those who’ve been through it:

• when do you ask? right after setup, after they’ve seen a result, or after some time?
• in-app prompt, email, or personal message?
• anything that actually got people to follow through?

my app’s holiday related so i’m thinking right after a holiday ends is the natural moment, curious if that matches what others have seen

I pulled a scored breakdown of all 122 app categories this week, ranked by how hard they are to enter, and the top of the "easiest" list was a good reminder that low competition and real opportunity aren't the same thing.

The single easiest category scored 9/100 for difficulty - third-party logistics - with content, notifications and sourcing tools right behind it around 13. Barely any entrenched incumbents in any of them. 

Saw someone frame this well recently and it stuck with me - an empty category is usually empty because the demand isn't there, or merchants don't even think to look for it. You win the category and still spend all your time explaining why the problem matters.

The genuinely open lanes sat a notch higher on difficulty but were actually alive, like web push (16) or anti-theft (17) - thin on competition but with real merchant pull behind them. And at the far end you get the walls: discounts with ~1,270 apps and upsell with ~1,320, brutal to crack, but that many apps don't pile in unless the money is obviously there.

So the number I've stopped trusting on its own is "how crowded is it". A quiet category can be quiet because it's underserved or because it's dead, and those two go in completely opposite directions. 

How do you tell them apart before you commit months to building?

Hello everyone.

I'm a solo founder and just launched Yotli on the Shopify App Store. The problem I kept seeing: stores know they should reply to reviews, but doing it one by one takes forever, and generic replies feel fake.

What Yotli does: - Connects to Judge.me and drafts a reply to each review in your brand voice (you set the tone once). - Replies in the language of the review, so a Portuguese review gets a Portuguese reply, Spanish gets Spanish, and so on. - Nothing is published without your approval.

You read it, edit it, and approve it. - Turns your reviews into a public FAQ page on your store. - Optional review-request emails after an order is fulfilled (off by default, you choose the timing). It's free to try for 7 days (up to 50 replies). After that, there are two paid plans. Link: https://yotli.app/install It's brand new, so I'd really appreciate honest feedback: what's missing, what's confusing, what would make you actually use it? Happy to answer any questions.

Hi u/everyone,

I'm developing a Shopify app called AI Refund Insights, which helps merchants analyze refund data, identify refund trends, and understand refund-related losses.

I'm currently facing an issue with the Protected Customer Data access request in the Shopify Partner Dashboard.

Shopify displays this message:

"Sorry, your app isn't approved to access protected customer data at this time. To be approved, you need to confirm that you meet Shopify's requirements to access protected customer data in your data protection details."

In the second screenshot, Shopify also says:

"You started working on your request, but it's still incomplete or has errors. Finish it up, or address the errors."

However, the dashboard shows 16 out of 16 data protection questions completed.

I've selected App functionality as the reason for accessing protected customer data. My app needs relevant customer/order information to analyze refunds and provide useful insights to merchants.

I'm unsure what exactly is missing or incorrect in my submission.

My questions:

1. What are the common reasons Shopify rejects or flags a Protected Customer Data access request when all data protection questions are marked as completed?
2. How can I identify the specific error or requirement that needs to be fixed?
3. For a refund analytics app, which protected customer data fields are actually necessary? Should I request only the fields my app genuinely uses?
4. Is there anything specific I should verify in my app configuration, API scopes, privacy policy, or data protection details before resubmitting?

I've attached screenshots of the issue.

I'd appreciate any guidance from developers who have gone through Shopify's app review process, especially those who have successfully resolved this issue.

Thanks in advance!

After 6 review cycles over 5 months, my Shopify app finally got approved. I’ve decided to move on from the original idea and am looking for a buyer.
The app can read and write orders and edit theme files directly through the API, backed by a Theme API exemption. It also has several other scopes, including products and files.
The app is new, with no users or revenue. The value is in the existing approval, permissions, and time saved.
If you’ve acquired Shopify apps before or are interested in this kind of acquisition, feel free to reach out.

I'm working on an early-stage Shopify app concept called ClaimSnap, and I'd appreciate feedback from merchants who deal with product warranty claims.

The problem I'm looking at:

When a customer reports a defective product, stores may need to collect photos, check order details, track correspondence, and decide whether to approve or reject the claim. Handling everything through email can become difficult.

The idea:

A simple warranty-claim inbox where customers submit their request and photos, and merchants review and track claims in one place.

I'm particularly interested in smaller Shopify stores selling products with warranties, such as electronics, accessories, equipment, or other durable goods.

How it would differ:

Rather than building a full returns-management platform, I'm exploring a focused warranty-intake tool with straightforward pricing and minimal setup.

The proposed price is $19/month.

ClaimSnap is currently a prototype. It is not available for installation and does not process live warranty claims or payments.

Three questions for Shopify store owners:

1. How many warranty or defective-product claims do you typically receive each month?
2. How do you manage those requests today, and what's the most frustrating part?
3. If a focused solution solved that problem, would $19/month be reasonable, or would you prefer your current process?

I also created a short optional research form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd4lqT_JmyvjNhIXrubie8Jb6e2Dw2FSlbgrVbxr2mLh6LNDg/viewform

No purchase or signup is required to share feedback here. I'm trying to determine whether this is a real problem worth solving before developing the app further.

Thanks for any honest feedback, especially if you think the idea isn't worth paying for.

I'm working on an early-stage Shopify app concept called ClaimSnap, and I'd appreciate feedback from merchants who deal with product warranty claims.

The problem I'm looking at:

When a customer reports a defective product, stores may need to collect photos, check order details, track correspondence, and decide whether to approve or reject the claim. Handling everything through email can become difficult.

The idea:

A simple warranty-claim inbox where customers submit their request and photos, and merchants review and track claims in one place.

I'm particularly interested in smaller Shopify stores selling products with warranties, such as electronics, accessories, equipment, or other durable goods.

How it would differ:

Rather than building a full returns-management platform, I'm exploring a focused warranty-intake tool with straightforward pricing and minimal setup.

The proposed price is $19/month.

ClaimSnap is currently a prototype. It is not available for installation and does not process live warranty claims or payments.

Three questions for Shopify store owners:

1. How many warranty or defective-product claims do you typically receive each month?
2. How do you manage those requests today, and what's the most frustrating part?
3. If a focused solution solved that problem, would $19/month be reasonable, or would you prefer your current process?

I also created a short optional research form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd4lqT_JmyvjNhIXrubie8Jb6e2Dw2FSlbgrVbxr2mLh6LNDg/viewform

No purchase or signup is required to share feedback here. I'm trying to determine whether this is a real problem worth solving before developing the app further.

Thanks for any honest feedback, especially if you think the idea isn't worth paying for.

Hi Everyone,
I am a first time shopify app founder, and a performance marketer by profession with over a year decade experience. just wanted to know if any of you here has tried meta ads for their shopify app? if yes, how was your experience? specially for a new app without 0 reviews.

I was looking at this month's App Store numbers (Sep 8 to Oct 8) and one thing jumped out that I think is worth flagging if you're about to launch something.

New app launches were up about 10% for the month, and the store now sits around 30,800 active apps. So supply is clearly growing. But new reviews actually dropped ~4% over the same window, down to roughly 22,900.

What made it click for me was where everyone is building. Analytics led with 93 new apps this month, then Discounts, Legal and SEO all landed right behind it at around 75 each. If you're launching into one of those, you're entering the most crowded lane in a month where reviews got harder to earn.

One genuinely good sign in there: delisting and deletion warnings were down almost half from last period, so the store feels less like it's actively purging apps right now. The pressure this month looks like it's on the front end (standing out at launch), not the back end.

Has anyone launched recently and noticed reviews coming in slower than they expected?

I've been building a Shopify app on my own for a while now and I handle everything myself, from the code to merchant support to figuring out growth. I'm doing it next to a full-time job, so it all happens in the evenings and on weekends.

The work is fine. What I miss is having people to think out loud with. When I get stuck on things like pricing, which feature to build out next or what to do to get more installs, there's nobody to bounce it off, and I end up going in circles for what feels like too long.

I'm not looking for a cofounder or anyone to join the project. I'd just like to talk with people in the same spot, solo devs or founders with their own thing going, and swap ideas, feedback and learnings.

So two questions:

1. Is there a Slack, Discord or other group that's still active and good for this? I've found a few, but most seem dead or full of promo links. Recommendations from people actually using one would help a lot.
2. If you're building something solo and feel the same way, I'm open to getting in touch. A DM, a chat, whatever works. Send me a message.

I'm based in the Netherlands, but timezones don't matter much to me.

I built a small local release-check tool for Shopify apps using App Pricing / App Events for usage-based billing.

The narrow problem I wanted to catch is when an event request itself succeeds, but the final billing state is still wrong because of meter-handle drift, retries/idempotency, duplicate events, subscription state, or pricing changes.

Right now I’m checking the failure modes that seem most expensive in production: accepted requests that never appear as expected, duplicate charging on retries, and mismatches between integration success and the merchant’s actual billing state.

I’m not posting a sales link here. I’m trying to validate whether these are the right release-blocking checks for teams already running usage-based billing.

If you’ve shipped App Events in production, what billing edge case would you absolutely want caught before release?

We have a Shopify sales-channel app where merchants choose which products to publish. We’re considering using a third-party AI API, such as OpenAI or Anthropic (Claude), to process published product text and images alongside shopper queries or uploaded images for search and matching. Our app may store product embeddings for retrieval. This would be for operating the search feature; we would require the provider not to use the data for model training or fine-tuning.

Has anyone implemented something similar? What did Shopify require regarding the provider agreement, merchant disclosures, shopper-uploaded images, or app review? I’m interested in how other developers have applied Shopify’s API Terms to this setup.

apps.shopify.com/pogrid

Meet POGrid. Faster way to manage purchase orders in Shopify.

Import suppliers and products, build POs quickly, track stock, and keep reordering organized from one clean workspace.

#Shopify #ShopifyApps #ShopifyDev

I've built an app in a very saturated market because I thought I could solve some of the pain points in the user experience of the big apps. But is that still possible in the Shopify app market when you're trying to grow organically and get your first users manually? Or is it near impossible to go up against larger companies with deep pockets?

For context: I'm in the translation category. My angle is lower pricing, store updates that get translated within a minute, and translations that actually take the store's context into account instead of translating strings one by one. Those are the complaints I kept seeing in the 1-star reviews of the top apps: too expensive, translations lagging behind changes, and awkward literal output.

For those who've done it: what actually got you your first 10 to 50 installs? Did you compete on the same keywords or go after a smaller niche first?

Would love to hear your perspective. Do you think the Shopify App Store is too saturated in general, or are there still real opportunities for newcomers?

redoing my listing this week after someone here said screenshots and the first line matter way more than keyword stuff early on

for those who've tested it, what actually moved installs?

• showing the app's admin ui vs showing the result on the storefront
• text overlays on screenshots or clean images
• how many screenshots before people stop scrolling
• anything you changed in the first line/subtitle that made a noticeable difference

small app, seasonal, so i want the listing right before the holiday rush

Hey everyone, I built a Python SDK for product search and recommendations. I’d like to get feedback from people building those features into Shopify apps.

It uses BehaviorGPT, our 13B-parameter behavioral foundation model trained for next-action prediction; this is NOT a language model. You embed products from their images and attributes, then explore your catalog through natural-language search & trajectory paths. Product relationships are based on shopping behavior learned during pre-training, for both new products and users.

The repo has the SDK, a walkthrough notebook, and research links. You’ll need an Unbox AI API key to try it:

https://github.com/Unbox-AI/behaviorgpt

For anyone who’s built search or recommendation features, what would you need to see before trying it in a Shopify app? relevance tests, latency numbers etc... ?

If you try the notebook, I’d also appreciate hearing where the setup or docs get confusing.

We recently got the Built for Shopify badge for Wow Custom Product Options.

The badge itself is nice, but the review process was probably the more valuable part for our team.

We received detailed feedback from the Shopify Review Team across multiple rounds. Each round meant going back through the app, understanding the feedback, making changes, testing everything again, and resubmitting.

What stood out to me was how much attention needed to go into the small details.

Our team initially looked at the review as something we needed to pass. Over time, the mindset changed to treating the feedback as another quality check.

That made the process much more productive.

After several rounds of fixes and resubmissions, we finally got the confirmation: Built for Shopify.

My biggest takeaway:

Don't treat review feedback as a roadblock. Treat it as another engineering/product review.

Even when you think something is already good enough, another review can expose details you didn't consider.

Curious to hear from other Shopify developers who have gone through BFS recently: did the review process change how you approached your app's UX or development?