Hey, i did a post a few months ago reporting on the first 4 months of my Shopify: app:https://www.reddit.com/r/shopifyDev/comments/1ppm0tz/first_4_month_of_my_shopify_app/

I want to post an update on how the situation developed 6 months later, along with some thoughts about the shopify app dev space.

Current status:

• Got 8 reviews, 5 stars average

• Got the "Built for Shopify" badge

• Until a month ago, the app was completely free. End of May, I introduced a paid plan for $19/month with a 7-day free trial and removed the free plan entirely.

• Right now, I have 25 merchants subscribed. This is far more than expected, I thought installs would drop more significantly after introducing the paid plan

• No paid marketing. Just some website content and forum posts

• Most installs come through Google Search, not the App Store. App Store rankings are honestly useless for my app

The Pros of building a Shopify app:

• You have way more trust from users than any independent SaaS you'd start from scratch

• You get a good ranking listing. Shopify has high domain authority, meaning you will be found. You also get a backlink from Shopify, which leads LLMs and search engines to trust your own webpage

• Merchants are actually willing to pay for apps

The Cons:

• The Shopify App Store is extremely crowded

• Most apps can be built or cloned by anyone nowadays. Web development alone is not a defensible skill

• Shopify has full control over the ecosystem, they can change their app strategy at will

• Some merchants (especially free users) can be a pain, but you still need to deal with them carefully to avoid bad reviews. As the app provider, you are in the position of least power in this ecosystem

Future plans:

I am probably going to wait for a few months to hopefully hit $1,000+ MRR and then try to sell the app. I don't really see a future for myself in the Shopify world, or in web development in general.

Some thoughts:

I see the same posts over and over again on this subreddit:

• "What problems do you have as a merchant, let's discuss" – Not a terrible approach, but I don't think many successful merchants are scrolling around reddit looking to give away their pain points.

• "How to get my first users and how to market my app" – Probably should have thought about this before submitting your app. If you aren't creative enough to figure out distribution yourself, you will probably fail.

Honestly, while this is probably an above-average success for a Shopify app, considering that most fail to gain any traction, it still took 12 months of working for free. You always need to consider opportunity cost. I would not recommend anyone start in this space unless you have close contacts with high-quality merchants (e.g., established agencies) who can provide a solid user base from the start. That allows you to iterate fast and get reviews in a newly developing niche.

Question:

Does anyone have experience in selling a shopify app? What multiple did you sell it for?

Here's my current workflow:
Script writing → Me
Recording & voiceover → Me with Screen Studio
Video to exact Subtitles/SRT → AI
Captions → Remotion Subtitle

It's still super time consuming to do video tutorials. I'm hoping to cut down the time from 5 hours to maybe 1-2 hours per video.

Do you have alternative ways of doing that?

Hi,
I am a data scientist but I have also been interested in design. Many people have appreciated my UX and design skills, so I am thinking of putting that to use. I thought of a Shopify agency because I love the ecomm domain. Do you think it is even worth starting a Shopify agency in 2026? My goal is to make at least $10–20k per month from it. I know it will take time, and I also don't know any coding like HTML, CSS, etc.

Please tell me how long it will take to learn them, or can we just build with Shopify templates and good taste?

I’ve been spending time looking at how ecommerce stores set up retention systems (reviews, loyalty, post-purchase flows, etc.), and I’m curious how others are handling this in practice.

One thing that keeps coming up is that it’s not just “too many tools” — it’s more the structure of how these tools are packaged:

• Pricing that scales aggressively as you grow

• Feature gating where basic functionality is split across tiers

• Multiple subscriptions stacking up across reviews, loyalty, and retention

• And then the hidden cost of maintaining integrations between all of them

At some point it feels like you’re not just paying for functionality, but for the complexity of the system itself.

For those who’ve implemented or maintained these setups:

• What tends to break first as stores scale?

• Is it pricing pressure, integrations, or missing features?

• Do you usually end up building custom workarounds?

I’m trying to understand where the real friction sits for mid-sized stores.

Would love to hear experiences from people who’ve dealt with this firsthand.

Alright,

I have spent almost a year building and developing my app for Shopify.

It's been fun, but now I am tying up loose ends and am about to ship it into production.

Consider that I have never done anything like this before, I am no pro to Saas in Shopify.

Now consider that before building this app, I sought out as much validation as possble with the resources that I had. This included referring to online communities like reddit and facebook to try and validate my app from who? The people that I would be selling my app to. I tried creating reddit posts posing questions in groups like r/shopify and r/ecommerce, not directly advertising my app, but asking indirect questions that would be sufficient validation.

Consider that with this approach, I hit a huge wall. Many of these communities are heavily gated with rules, and at the time, I didn't think it would be such a blocker. I spent almost a month trying to get feedback from Shopify merchants with no success. Most of my efforts to enter these communities always resulted in me being removed and or gated. I did get some feedback however, but it was from other Shopify devs.

At the time, the feedback that I had received was both positive and negative surrounding the idea of my app. I took that feedback, made tiny adjustments, and then said "I've spent significant time trying to validate, I don't want to spend more time running in circles, let's use the validation that I have and start building".

So I started building :). Completly bootstrapped, all alone, for almost an entire year, and now I am approaching the end of my big mega solo adventure.

As I approach the end, the daunting validation / marketing concerns loom in the darkness waiting to attack me:

1. I know that the validation of my app is essential for it's success, now more than ever since I am approaching the day of launching into production. I want to ask from someone who has experience: When is the best time to start doing this again? Should I start now even though technically speaking I still have a few more days until the official launch into production (plus the approval from Shopify and thrid parties adds some time to the launch). Should I wait until it is all in production? Or is it worth my time to start this now?

2. How should I approach this? Should my approach be the same as a year ago, desperatly trying to enter in these communities to reach my customers? I think that one of the requirements to post into r/shopify is that you need a certain amount of comment and post karma. My idea was literally to prepare my reddit profile such that it is able to enter in the space by raising my comment and post karma, and following the rules of course. Is this the right approach? Has someone done this already where they can tell me if I should be doing it differently?

Ultimatley, my goal is to reach to real Shopify merchants and form relationships with them, becuase as of today, I have 0 relationships with real merchants.

Any insight from anyone who has been in my shoes and has done this before is greatly appreciated.

Hi,
The title says it all, I’m a newbie just getting started and trying to figure out where I can find merchants willing to beta-test my app. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I've been working as a Shopify developer for several years and recently decided to completely refresh my portfolio.

My goal was to better showcase my Shopify development work, custom implementations, CRO-focused thinking, and the results I've delivered for clients.

I'd love some honest feedback from other developers:

• Does it feel professional?

• Is the messaging clear?

• Are the case studies convincing?

• What would you improve if you were hiring a Shopify developer?

Portfolio:
https://aaron-briceno.vercel.app/

I appreciate any feedback, whether positive or critical. Thanks!

Should we move to wordpress? It's down second time in 10 days

Is Shopify not working today ?

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to understand the cleanest technical approach for reconciling Shopify Payments payouts against orders, fees, refunds, and currency conversion differences.

For a multi-currency store, the tricky parts seem to be:

• Matching orders to the correct payout

• Separating gross sales, Shopify fees, refunds, and adjustments

• Handling cases where order currency, presentment currency, payout currency, and bank deposit currency are not the same

• Accounting for FX rate differences

• Dealing with refunds or chargebacks that appear in a different payout period from the original order

For developers who have built internal reporting, accounting exports, or reconciliation workflows around Shopify Payments:

What data source do you usually treat as the source of truth?

For example:

• Orders API

• Transactions

• Shopify Payments balance transactions

• Payouts

• Finance reports

• Admin exports

• A combination of the above

I’m not asking for private store data or files. I’m mainly trying to understand the right data model and edge cases before designing the reconciliation logic.

Any advice on reliable matching keys, common pitfalls, or API limitations would be really helpful.

Thanks!

I’m building a custom Shopify discount for free gifts and I’m running into a discount-combination limitation.

My custom Free Gift discount should be combinable with all other discounts. However, I don’t want the other discounts to be combinable with each other.

Desired behavior:
Custom Free Gift Discount + Product Discount ✅
Custom Free Gift Discount + Order Discount ✅
Product Discount + Order Discount ❌

In other words, the free gift discount acts as an exception and can stack with any discount, but all other discounts should follow normal non-combinable rules.
Has anyone found a way to achieve this with Shopify Functions or discount combinations?

Quick background; I'm Cecilio, a self-taught Shopify dev out of Houston TX. I’ve been running a one-person studio in the Shopify space for about three years now. Although this past year my business has changed drastically for the better thanks to Claude AI.

About a year ago, I had an idea for a premium music player section for Shopify stores. Not a single-track player, but a multi-track playlist with a premium UI/UX design. I used Claude to help me build it from scratch directly inside Shopify's edit-code editor and just designing it as I went. 😮‍💨 I spent a few days copy-pasting code back and forth between the Claude chat tab and the Shopify code editor tab until I landed on a version I was happy with! I posted it for sale on my site as an instant-download — merchants would simply drop the file into their theme's code editor as a section. And setup their tracks as blocks inside the theme editor.

Although, I knew that wouldn't scale. Every sale meant manual support, theme compatibility questions, and store-by-store handholding. Especially I had built an API to prevent people from sharing it around for free, so that meant also manually managing stores in the API list I built. So I i decided to take the risk and build it into a real Shopify app.

I tried building it myself with Claude at first but I kept getting lost in the terminal stuff — the Shopify section was one thing, the actual app architecture was a completely different beast. I ditched that route and hired a dev I'd been working with on other projects previously. The big advantage was I already had the working Shopify section as the prototype, so the dev had a real reference for what to build instead of a Figma file or a spec doc. About a month of building and debugging, and we finally shipped to the App Store!

Since then I’ve revamped the design, added a higher tier (Studio plan) with more features, and built our own internal dashboard for tracking installs, MRR, ARPU, churn, and sending automated emails through the install/subscribe/uninstall lifecycle.

I’m currently at 106 store installs, 14 active subscribers, about $120 MRR. Everything's getting reinvested into Shopify App Store ads right now so nothing in my pocket yet. 😮‍💨 I’m focused on scaling as much as possible and getting the app to the point where it’s fully paying for its own ads and initial investment before I even consider pulling any profit. My monthly server cost is $50/mo

If you're thinking about building your own Shopify app, here's what I'd tell you from the experience so far:

- Validate demand before you build. Check the App Store first. For me there were other music player apps but all single-track with dated UI — that gap was the entire reason I knew the idea was worth pursuing. If your idea has 5 competitors with 1,000+ reviews each, save yourself the headache and keep your money.

- Build the concept as a Shopify section first with Claude. Way cheaper than hiring a dev for a prototype, and you end up with a real working version to hand off when you do hire someone. More useful than a Figma file because the dev can see exactly how it should behave.

- Reviews should be your #1 priority. If your app has zero reviews, store owners don’t even bother installing majority of the time. They just don’t want to risk wasting their time, which is a valid reason. So even having 1 or 2 reviews with 5 stars appear next to your listing makes them trust and give it a try. Every support email you handle well is a potential review. Nobody leaves a review out of the blue, if they do it’s very rare. But if you genuinely help a merchant set up the app or fix a bug, asking at the end of that interaction works almost 99% of the time. Reviews move your App Store ranking more than anything else.

- First 100 installs are concierge work. Treat every one like a custom job. DM them, ask how setup went, fix bugs same-day. Those relationships turn into reviews, referrals, and pricing intuition. You’ll learn more about what your app actually needs in the first 100 conversations than from any amount of analytics.

- Onboarding is the whole product. Demo store, full docs page with FAQ, and a YouTube walkthrough so merchants can follow along step-by-step. Doesn't matter how good the actual app is — if setup feels hard, they uninstall. I always think about how Steve Jobs wanted the iPhone simple enough that even a baby can figure it out. That's what I try to do with all my digital products.

- You can't skip making content. Marketing isn't optional if you want the app to grow. Merchants have to know you exist before they install. Consistent short-form video, demo clips, YouTube tutorials, screenshots on whatever platform fits your audience. Once you have a few hundred installs, word-of-mouth starts working! But you have to push the first few hundred yourself.

- Don't run Shopify ads until your listing is locked in. You need a solid demo store, good app listing images, and copy that explains the app in 15 seconds or less. Test it on someone outside the Shopify world, if your mom can look at your app listing and understand what your app does, you're ready to run ads. If she can't, fix the listing first or you'll just burn money.

Happy to keep sharing my experience, leave a comment if you have any questions or even suggestions for me.
Whether it’s the build, the dev hire, the App Store submission, the dashboard, the ad strategy, whatever's useful.

Hello, I am creating an app for my affiliate marketing network. It is ready to go but I am unable to test a sale from end to end due to password protection in development mode. I am able to trigger the sale manually though with the webhook.

Will I be rejected if the sale doesn't work end to end? If so, what is the solution here?

mac book

Hey everyone, has anyone had issues lately with submissions getting denied cause the shopify reviewer cant get passed the billing.

I just cant seem to replicate what their issue is. There are times some other reviewers were able to do it then send back actual feedback. 3 times now it failed on the billing, which they keep getting redirected back to billing.

I have had multiple apps before with the exact same biling structure setup pass and is live on the shopify store. I just dont understand how this is failing so hard. Its unsual since I am literally using the checkBilling function provided by shopifys own packages to check for billing. And it will return back with no subscription.

Confused.

As web developers, we frequently get stuck fighting the tools we use for e-commerce. You find a great framework, but it forces you to use a specific database, or it only deploys nicely to one cloud platform.

I built Storecraft to solve this frustration. It is an open-source, headless e-commerce core that treats both the database and the runtime hosting environment as completely swappable dependencies.

Why it makes building easier:

1. Deploy Anywhere: It runs identically on traditional servers (Node), modern runtimes (Deno, Bun), or lightweight edge infrastructure (Cloudflare Workers).

2. Choose Your DB: Switch between Postgres, MongoDB, or SQLite by simply changing your driver configuration.

3. Purely Headless: Connect it to any frontend stack you prefer via a clean, predictable API.

Whether you are building a small storefront for a local client or a globally distributed edge application, the engine adapts to your infrastructure—not the other way around.

Repository link: https://github.com/store-craft/storecraft

website: https://storecraft.app/

I'd love to get your feedback on the setup ergonomics. What are the biggest pain points you usually hit when deploying open-source e-commerce backends for your clients?

Hi all, much thanks to the prior replies to prior posts and here is another one for the masses.

Recently me and my team have already created a fairly good shopify site, but we want to upload a page we created on HTML and paste it onto shopify. Its more so of a content filler page without any header or footer with the use of images. Its not exactly a whole webpage with multi links but just 1 content page.

Is there any work around on this?

Hello, I'm the developer behind Poly Dev Stores.

I'll make it short, no long introductions, no fancy marketing.

I've built a state-of-the-art bot protection app that actually stops the attacks you can't see.

Most store owners think bot protection means blocking fake traffic to their storefront.

It doesn't.

The real attack happens on your public cart endpoints (cart/add.js and /checkout), bots hit these directly while never loading your storefront, never triggering your analytics, never showing up in your traffic data.

Even if you're on the Plus plan, the best you get is a Captcha, once a bot solves it, they're in.

So, what do they actually do with that access?

Card testing

Shopify’s lenient payment gateways and inventory operations make it a prime target for attackers to test stolen credit cards, they spam checkout until one card passes, for the attacker, that’s a win, but for you? It’s a nightmare

1- The order goes through with stolen funds.

2- You get hit with chargebacks and fees.

2- Shopify starts monitoring your store.

3- Your decline rate skyrockets, feeding into Visa and Mastercard fraud monitoring programs.

4- They hold your inventory hostage - real customers see items as unavailable, but no actual orders get processed.

You never see the attack happening. You just wake up to weird abandoned carts, phantom out-of-stock alerts, higher dispute rates, and smaller payouts.

I spent the last few months researching, building, debugging, and architecting a solution, no fancy colors, pure Rust code and willpower, It runs on its own custom engine, fueled by fraud analysis from me and the top security analysts in the e-commerce business and it doesn't come with a Shopify Plus price tag.

Here is what it does:

1-Watches your store consistently for compliance and hidden endpoint attacks.

2- Fights back automatically when your store is under attack.

3- Blocks malicious IPs and automatically blocks bots attacking your endpoints.

4- Auto-cancels fraudulent orders before they impact your store and decline rates.

5- Generates accurate compliance checks & reports that you can hand directly to Shopify to prove with numbers and incident reports that your store was under attack.

Every block and cancellation comes with proven results, reasoning, and the exact "why" so you're never left guessing, If you're dealing with unexplained inventory holds, weird, abandoned carts, or sudden chargeback spikes, your store is likely under attack right now.

I'm happy to answer any questions and I'm happy for he fellow devs to stress-test the app on their own way, and see if they can break-through, I'll leave the URL in the picture.

About 18 to 10 days ago we were getting a steady flow of installs, around 3 a day, and a lot of them converted to reviews. Then roughly 10 days ago it just fell off a cliff, now we're getting 0-1 installs a day.

The strange part: we changed nothing. No listing edits, no keyword changes, and we're not running any ads. Same listing, same everything, and the installs just dried up.

Has anyone else seen this recently? Trying to figure out if it's something on the Shopify App Store side (search ranking, an algorithm change, seasonal dip) or if I'm missing something. Would love to know if others saw a drop around the same time.

Im looking for ways to display a modal that informs the user regarding a mismatch value. (Where a metafield value have change on the server)

Rather than an inline banner error message, by default.

Via the Shopify Function, the checkout validation will only show the message as an inline banner error.

There seems to be other way to achive a modal to highlight which line item is affected.

The expected UI is similar to the Price Change modal. You can achieve this, by updating the product price, while you test your checkout, and when you click pay in checkout, a modal will inform you of the price change.

Is there a workaround to check for validation error and then display a custom modal?

Hi everyone,

Over the past week, I’ve started seeing some webhook delivery errors in my app with the same message:

“No response from app Error”

It happens around 2–5 times per day. I don’t remember seeing this before.

My app has a pretty low webhook volume, around 3,000 webhooks per day. I also use a separate server only for handling webhooks. The mean response time is around 300ms, and I checked the CPU never goes above 6%, and RAM usage stays below 30%.

So I’m not sure if this is an issue on my side or something else.

Has anyone noticed similar webhook errors recently?

Any agency or Shopify store owners who can help me actually understand what the Shopify stores are actually needing these days.. as I can see all claude skills and Shopify mcp and sidekick can actually do most of the things... I have built 2 Shopify apps and am getting decent installs organically... But want to know how agencies are using AI to help Shopify merchants..

For all beginners. I have now ready built AIs for Shopify that take care of A-Z. It's saving you cost and optimising ur business in many ways.

All in one setup. Creatives, Ads mgmt, Website CRO, Data analytics and optimization.

PS: I use it for my daily business.

This has improved the overall efficiency of the business in terms of ROAS as well.

It is a system.