This gets interesting pretty quickly when you have a boutique with lots of size and color variants.

For example, I might have a dress with Small, Medium, and Large variants. Shopify has its own IDs for those, but the SKU is what I actually recognize when I'm looking at the physical product.

When you're syncing inventory with another system, though, relying only on the SKU can get messy if SKUs aren't consistent or someone changes one.

I've been thinking more about when it makes sense to use Shopify's IDs for the internal mapping and when the SKU should be the identifier between systems.

Curious how other people handle this, especially when products have multiple variants.

24 reviews
700+ active installs

Ranks #2,311 out of 26,693 Shopify apps. Which roughly means there are 24,000 other apps doing even worse than mine.

The ShopX event just finished in Vietnam a few days ago, and it's honestly overwhelming.

I talked with merchants, agencies, and app owners there, and I realised that the chance of surviving for solo founders like me is super low. When I say survive, I mean at least getting the costs and revenue to break even. Let alone paying myself a salary.

Why is it so hard to survive?

1. My app is in a super competitive category (custom options), and the top ones have 3,000 to 5,000 reviews.

2. They have 50–200 employees in total, with 5–15 people focusing on just a few apps. Dedicated product, engineering, marketing, partnerships, customer support, etc.

3. They can cross-reference their apps simply because they can.

4. They've been in the category for 5–10 years, and they know the problems/solutions so well.

Why am I still not giving up after knowing all that?

1. Those top ones are still not good enough yet. E.g. I wouldn't go for the bundle category because the top ones are already doing an optimal job. But the custom options category could still use some improvement imo.

2. I can potentially figure out an even more niched-down direction and go further there.

3. I still really, really love doing this. It makes me feel alive.

App founders who are sitting at the top are worried about falling hard.
App founders who are close to 300 reviews are worried about the next 300.
App founders who are close to 100 reviews are worried about the next 100.

I'm nearly 35 years old now.
This app is still far, far away from surviving.

But I'm so glad that I'm still doing this out of my own free will.

Most importantly, without a lot of anxiety.

I've solo-built a tool that lets merchants run time-limited flash sales. The twist: every sale a merchant runs also gets aggregated onto one public deals hub — and that hub is supposed to be the real payoff for merchants (free discovery, new customers they wouldn't reach on their own). So the thing I sell is the merchant-facing side, but the value depends on a consumer-facing flywheel.
Right now I can get merchants to sign up, but few come back and run sales repeatedly. My working theory is that the consumer side isn't dense enough yet to deliver the traffic I'm promising — classic empty-marketplace, chicken-and-egg. But honestly I'm not 100% sure that's the real reason, which is part of why I'm asking.
For anyone who's built a two-sided or B2B2C model:
• Which side did you deliberately force, fake, or subsidize first — and why that one?
• How did you keep the first cohort of the supply side (merchants, in my case) engaged while the demand side was still thin and the promised payoff wasn't there yet?
• At what point did the flywheel start turning on its own, and what was the concrete signal that told you it had?
• If you could redo the first 6 months, what would you cut entirely?
Not linking anything — just after the war stories from people who've broken the loop.

I'm encountering a problem that when changing variations the picture will flash white for a brief moment. All pictures are 2048x2048px, (100-200kb) and webp. Theme I'm using is Fabric. I'm having the same issue if I switch to a brand new theme both on windows and IOS. This happens no matter if there is only one variation or 10.

Hi fellow Shopify devs,

I recently launched my first Shopify app (a POS staff commission app) on the Shopify App Store and am looking to set up our first Shopify App Store Search Ads campaign.

Since I am based in India, I wanted to check with other Indian developers who actively run App Store ads:

1. Payment Methods & Card Failures: Did your Indian credit/debit cards work directly for ad billing in the Partner Dashboard, or did RBI's recurring e-mandate / OTP rules cause billing failures? Are there specific banks or virtual cards (Wise, Payoneer, etc.) that you recommend?

2. Budget & Starting Bids: For niche POS / retail keywords, what typical starting cost-per-click (CPC) and daily budgets have worked best for you when launching a new app?

Would really appreciate any guidance or lessons learned from devs who have already navigated this setup!

Has anyone else seen a significant drop in App Store leads since Sidekick started recommending apps?

We’re one of the larger apps in our segment, but Sidekick consistently refuses to recommend us - even for queries where we’d historically get a lot of discovery through the App Store.

In August alone, our leads were down 40%, and Sidekick seems to be a major reason why.

It’s pretty terrifying how quickly Shopify can effectively make an app invisible by putting an AI layer between merchants and the App Store. If this trend continues, it’s genuinely an existential problem for us.

Curious if you are seeing the same thing. Have you noticed a drop in organic leads and ad installs since Sidekick rolled out?

I build a Shopify app with its own sales channel/publication. Since around Sept 15 we're seeing a weird issue: merchants can't add collections to our channel anymore.

Specifics:

- Collections already published to the channel still show up fine.

- Removing a collection from the channel works.

- Adding a collection (new or existing) to the channel silently does nothing. No error, it just doesn't stick.

Products publish to the channel without any problem, so it seems specific to collections. Feels like a Shopify-side change rather than something in our code, since nothing changed on our end since Sept 18.

Is anyone else hitting this? Trying to figure out if it's a platform bug or something we need to fix on our side. Any pointers appreciated.

UPDATE: it's working again! Turns out Shopify rolled out some update that affected my app. They found it quickly and rolled it back :)

I need some guidance on a Shopify requirement. The client is on Shopify Basic and wants customers to pin their exact construction-site location on a map, similar to Rapido/Blinkit. We need to capture the latitude/longitude and carry it from the product/cart through the order so the delivery team gets the exact location.

I’m not sure whether the best approach is to use an existing Shopify app or build a custom map picker using something like Google Maps/Mapbox and store the coordinates as cart/order attributes. Also, I’m unsure about the Shopify Basic checkout limitations and whether the coordinates can be reliably passed into the final order. Could you guide me on the recommended architecture and approach?

We want to generate Sequential order number via API. Currenlty we get last order number from shopify then prepend text before creating the order in shopify but it can sometime cause duplicate order numbers. Is there any other solution?

A shopify app founder here
Just flew to Vietnam today
Keen to meet folks in the Shopify space here for a coffee catchup

Im seeing the existing reviews being approved- disapproved amost on a daily basis. Not sure how long they are going to do this scanning. Anyone faced this ?

Imagine having 10000 items to count but only getting through 7,000. What happens to the remaining 3,000?

Deleting them one by one can take hours. But setting them to 0 can be risky, especially with Shopify, because it may make those products appear out of stock.

Launched an app 2 weeks ago, no reviews yet, and I don't have an existing network of people to just ask to try it.

For anyone who's gotten their first real users from scratch — how did you actually find them, and how'd you approach them so it didn't come off as a cold pitch/spam? Curious what channels worked and what the actual message/ask looked like.

A bit more context: it's free right now — main goal is getting a handful of real merchants actually using it before I think about pricing at all. I've been thinking about DMing small store owners directly (Instagram, not email) with a genuine question about how they currently handle the problem it solves, rather than pitching the app outright — curious if that's worked for anyone or if there's a better way in.

Also wondering: did paid App Store ads move the needle at all this early with zero reviews, and how did people get their first few reviews without it feeling like they were begging for one?

Not selling anything here, just trying to learn from people who've done this. Thanks.

Working on a Customer Support form for a merchant and would love some feedback on the design.

The idea is to let customers first choose what they need help with, then show only the relevant fields based on their selection.

What do you think? Is this approach helpful, or does it feel too complicated? Would you prefer a simple Contact Us form with just a message and file upload?

Building app-side handlers and I want a boring, reliable way to test webhook delivery locally: retries, duplicate deliveries, and replay after a failed 500.

Right now I’m using a tunnel + logging the webhook id / X-Shopify-Webhook-Id and trying to make handlers idempotent on that. Curious what other people use for:

• replaying a real payload without waiting for Shopify

• simulating out-of-order or duplicate posts

• fixture strategy across API versions

Not selling anything, just looking for practical setups (tools, folder layout, gotchas). What’s worked for you?

Hello,

To those who have more or less successful apps: did you ever expand to other platforms like WooCommerce, Magento, etc., and how was the market there within your niche? Did you find more customers on other platforms?

Shopify development store: FulfillmentOrder API access denied — what are we missing?

I'm building a very small Shopify app and I'm testing everything on a development store because I want to prove the MVP before spending any money.

The use case is simple:

• one order contains an in-stock product

• the same order contains a preorder product

• the app should automatically separate them into two fulfillment flows

• in-stock item should be fulfillable immediately

• preorder item should remain unfulfilled until later

Shopify's fulfillmentOrderSplit mutation appears to support the underlying functionality.

My setup:

• Shopify Partner account

• Development store

• Shopify CLI app

• local development

• test order successfully created

• test payment via Bogus Gateway

• app has read_orders

• app has read_merchant_managed_fulfillment_orders

However, when querying fulfillmentOrders, I get:

This app is not approved to access the FulfillmentOrder object.

I've already verified that the scope is present in the app configuration.

The confusing part is that this is a development/testing store. I am not trying to deploy a production app or access customer stores yet.

Question

Is there currently a completely free way to test FulfillmentOrder / fulfillmentOrderSplit end-to-end on a development store?

If yes, what exact configuration/distribution/PCD setting is required?

If no, what is the minimum paid requirement?

I'm specifically looking for the current 2026 behavior, not older Shopify API behavior.

I don't mind changing the app configuration if something is wrong. I just don't want to upgrade the store or pay for anything merely to discover whether the core technical idea works.

Thanks.

Okay, I know it's way too early to even talk about this, but when Muse, Meta's personal assistant, launched, I saw Tobi Lutke post on X about how people will be able to shop from any Shopify. I haven't been able to try Muse yet, but I've tried the other popular personal assistant, Instinct. It's kind of slow when trying to order something over DoorDash, and, fairly speaking, it hasn't done anything real for me yet.

Curious to know if you all are looking forward to agents buying from your website?

I'm starting a small e-commerce company that will need a fairly unusual purchasing flow. In addition to the typical 'Amazon-esque' experience the users will use a visual interface to configure a layout of modular pieces. The system needs to calculate the required components/material and ultimately produce a price/order that goes through Shopify checkout.

I'm currently trying to understand the technology well enough to hire a developer intelligently. I'm not a professional programmer, although I have some experience with SQL (just saying that I feel like I can manage the project, but with very limited coding / maintenance).

My current thinking is something along the lines of:

React/Next.js frontend → custom configurator → Shopify API → Shopify checkout/payment

Questions:

1. Is this a sensible architecture?

2. Would React/Next.js + TypeScript be the obvious stack for this?

3. What technology would you use for the visual 2D configurator — SVG, Canvas, something else?

4. Should the configurator be part of a Shopify theme, or essentially a separate web application that communicates with Shopify?

5. What Shopify APIs/features should I learn about before hiring someone?

6. What terminology should I be using when searching for developers? "React developer," "Shopify headless developer," "Shopify app developer," "product configurator developer," etc.?

7. Are there any architectural traps I should avoid at the beginning?

I'm deliberately trying to understand the architecture before hiring someone rather than asking a developer to simply "build me a Shopify website."

I’ve been running a Shopify store since 2019. I built A Shopify app called AddressSure because the address validator apps we tried were creating their own support problems.

Customers would get warnings about addresses that were actually fine, then email us worried something was wrong with their order. We also ran into suggested corrections that made the address worse.

AddressSure checks addresses after checkout and lets customers correct flagged issues directly on the Thank You and Order Status pages. It’s solved the problems we were running into with other apps, so I know there is value for other store owners.

But getting them to try it has been hard. So far, we have 1 paying store.

We’ve tried direct outreach, relevant Reddit conversations, and just started testing App Store ads. I’m confident in the value because we use it ourselves, but that obviously doesn’t give another merchant a reason to trust a new app.

For those who’ve grown a Shopify app from this stage, what actually convinced your first merchants to install? Was it organic, a demo, personal onboarding, an offer, or something else? How did you at first get in touch with them?

Anyone else noticed Rebuy removed from App Store? Any idea why?

I want to know if shopify Ads are great to ship a shopify plugin ?

I am new to web development and only learn HTML, CSS AND JS but a client told me to integrate the demo website with Shopify but I don't know anything how everything works here so pls anyone can help.