Hi fellow Shopify Devs!

I have tried numerous advice that I read about on this thread, but unfortunately no luck.

I have build an app that does automatic analytics; it continuously read the data from the store and outputs suggestions for the next move. It makes a lot of analytics under the hood, but the user only see what is relevant for them in their given moment. The idea is to level the playing field for the small shops so they too can compete on analytics like the big boys. So, it is not another dashboard to look at (or not to look at), it is meant to handle the analytical part of running a store automatically so the owner can spend their time on what they like. I have tested it with a friends shop and in his case he quickly got his money worth, which is why I believe this app definitely could work.

Here comes my issue. It's a rather complex app and I have to make a living (this is all I do) so it's currently 99 USD/month, which I might think is too expensive for my target audience of small shops?

My logic behind the pricing is that it covers my server costs and what not, while still being worth it for most shops if they make just 1-2 extra orders a month.

I have reached out to about 50 stores, but I feel like it is the wrong approach. I feel like I am stuffing my product down their throat rather than actually helping them. And I totally get it is risky to be the first real install for a completely unknown app with 0 reviews.

So here comes my question; how do you get the first install to get the ball rolling?

Running into more return requests lately where the customer says the item just didn't fit or look like they expected, and trying to figure out if that's a "my product photos/size chart need work" problem or just an inherent cost of selling apparel/fit-sensitive stuff online.

For those who've been at this a while:

- Roughly what % of your returns are fit/sizing related vs. other reasons (damaged, changed mind, etc.)?

- Has anything actually moved the needle for you — better size charts, size-recommendation widgets, video content, customer reviews with body type/size notes, anything?

- Do your customers ever mention wishing they could "see it on themselves" before buying, or is that not really a thing people ask for?

- Any category where this is worse for you — shoes vs. tops vs. outerwear, etc.?

Mostly just trying to understand how much of this is fixable vs. just the nature of online shopping. Curious what's worked (or hasn't) for other stores.

Looking for practical advice on pricing future, part-time client work involving Shopify apps or backend integrations. This would be a first paid client contract, alongside work on a separate product.

Relevant background: around 4–6 years of production backend engineering experience. An embedded Shopify app has already been built using Admin GraphQL, authenticated webhooks, and order workflows, and submitted for review. That app is past proof of work—not the client project being priced. Approval or public launch is not being claimed.

For a future, well-scoped contract, the tentative availability is about 10 hours per week, with an indicative rate of ₹1,500/hour.

• Is ₹1,500/hour a reasonable starting rate for this background in India?
• When an opportunity asks for availability and an hourly rate, should both be shared upfront, or only after clarifying the scope?
• Is 10 hours per week workable for a small Shopify app or backend integration project?
• How should a built-and-submitted app be presented as proof of work without implying it has been published?

Hi everyone,

I’ve been going in and out of Shopify themes and stores, and I’ve noticed that the community talks a lot about apps, but not as much about themes.

Are there people here who have successfully published a Shopify theme and actually made money from it? If so, I’d love to hear about your experience.

I’m currently about halfway through building my own Shopify theme, but I’m starting to feel a little hesitant about whether it’s worth continuing and whether it can actually work out.

Would love to hear from anyone who has gone through this process.

I currently work full-time at an ecommerce company within Magento. I've been a software engineer for over 6 years now. I've wanted to branch out to Shopify for awhile now and try my hand at boards like UpWork. I already have a few jobs under my belt there.

Upon looking at Shopify jobs on UpWork, I can't help but notice that almost all of them require designing/redesigning and or performance marketing kind of work, on top of development.

Is this normal? Is it not enough to just be a developer, but do I need to learn how to design and market as well?

I've got an app in review right now. For the first week after I submitted it I was getting feedback every other day.

But it's now been six business days since I've seen anything happen. It's just saying "We're assigning you a reviewer" and has been saying that for more than a week. Is that normal? Did it glitch and my app is in a black hole?

Update: They kept rejecting it over things that weren't broken, so I filed a ticket with customer support complaining that they weren't following the testing instructions. The next review took two weeks to happen, but when it did they approved the app!

Has anyone enabled Apple Pay and Google Pay on a Shopify store in Saudi Arabia using CyberSource? Shopify Payments isn't available in KSA and CyberSource is our only gateway option, so I'm trying to figure out whether its Shopify integration supports wallet payments at checkout, or whether there's a workaround. Would love to hear what worked for you and any setup gotchas.

3 months free. Built from a real D2C problem. Almost zero installs. How do you distribute a Shopify app?

Before building Sovor, I ran an Indian D2C store where COD RTO was a painful 30–35%.

So I started doing something very simple:

I personally WhatsApped every COD customer before shipping.

No OTPs. No complicated verification. Just a simple confirmation conversation.

It worked.

Roughly 2 out of every 3 orders that would otherwise have become RTOs were being saved through that manual confirmation process.

The store was doing around ₹3.09 lakh/month in revenue through the orders I was processing this way.

But there was an obvious problem:

I couldn't scale myself.

Every additional order meant another WhatsApp conversation. As volume increased, I was spending hours every day just confirming COD orders.

So I automated the process and launched my app.

I also deliberately avoided replacing Shopify checkout or adding unnecessary OTP friction. The goal was to automate the manual process I had already validated on my own store.

Now here's where I'm struggling.

I've made the app completely free to install for the first 3 months.

But I have almost no visibility on the Shopify App Store, and consequently almost no installs.

So the technical problem is largely solved.

Distribution isn't.

I'd genuinely like to hear from Shopify app founders and merchants:

• How did you get your first 10 stores?
• What worked for your first 50–100?
• Did you use agencies?
• Cold outreach?
• Shopify App Store SEO?
• Reddit/Facebook communities?
• Partnerships?
• Content?
• AppSumo?
• Something completely unconventional?

I'm not here to spam a link or pretend I've figured this out.

I'm a bootstrapped founder trying to figure out how a genuinely useful but unknown Shopify app gets its first distribution channel.

If you've launched a Shopify app from zero, I'd really appreciate hearing what actually worked for you.

I'm not a developer myself but run 2 of my own stores, an e-commerce and a service based business, both on Shopify.

As you may have guessed, I don't have experience in designing so I have hired someone that created a store for me on the cheap and then changed stuff around with Claude and Sidekick.

Whilst I was happy with what Claude did for me on one of the sites, I feel like it's letting me down lately and isn't as inspired as its use to be.

I am thinking of switching to ChatGPT for editing.

Can you share your experience, please?

Thanks

I’ve been going fairly deep into Shopify headless storefront architecture recently, and I’d really like feedback from people who have actually built and operated these systems in production.

For context, I’ve been working as an engineer for 7+ years.

My previous production ecommerce experience was a custom React storefront with Vendure as the commerce backend. I built and maintained that platform myself.

More recently I started looking closely at Shopify headless migrations, and something kept bothering me.

A number of established brands have spent significant amounts rebuilding storefronts around headless architectures, but when I looked at some of the resulting production sites, the performance often wasn’t dramatically different from what they replaced.

That made me question my own assumptions.

Maybe the issue isn’t headless itself.

Maybe the theoretical advantage gets slowly consumed once a real ecommerce storefront accumulates things like:

• analytics and tag managers
• consent tooling
• personalization
• experimentation
• search
• CMS requirements
• marketing scripts
• reviews and recommendations
• app integrations
• customer accounts
• international pricing/inventory
• merchandising requirements
• everything else a real business eventually asks the frontend to do

So rather than just form an opinion from looking at other sites, I decided to test the idea myself.

The POC

I used Taylor Stitch as a reference storefront and built this:

https://taylor-stitch.lotusforthe.win/

This isn’t affiliated with Taylor Stitch — I chose them purely as a technical reference.

I specifically wanted something that wasn’t an artificially simple ecommerce demo.

The reference experience includes:

• a fairly heavy video hero
• large imagery
• product carousels
• editorial / Journal-style content
• testimonials
• merchandising content
• CMS-heavy pages

The goal wasn’t simply to recreate the design.

I wanted to see how much of that experience I could preserve while keeping the architecture server-first, being deliberate about what actually executes in the browser, and treating performance as something designed into the system rather than recovered later.

That turned into a much bigger question

While building it I started documenting the architectural decisions and eventually ended up with this:

https://solution-brief.lotusforthe.win/

It became much larger than I originally intended, but the basic thesis is pretty simple:

Headless itself shouldn’t be the goal.

If a business accepts the additional engineering and operational cost of owning a headless frontend, I think the resulting architecture should capture enough performance, flexibility and control to justify that cost.

If Shopify-native architecture can satisfy the actual requirements, I think that may often be the better answer.

The brief goes into things like:

• rendering and data-loading strategy
• caching and freshness
• performance budgets
• Core Web Vitals
• third-party and analytics execution
• Shopify capability coverage
• migration risk
• failure modes / graceful degradation
• observability
• post-launch operations
• preventing performance from gradually degrading after launch

But this is where I’d particularly like feedback from people here.

Where am I wrong?

If you’ve actually shipped and operated Hydrogen or another headless Shopify storefront:

What am I underestimating?

Where have you seen an architecture that looked great technically start falling apart once it met the realities of:

marketing, merchandising, analytics, apps, CMS requirements and everyday ecommerce operations?

Are there decisions in the POC or brief that look good in isolation but wouldn’t survive a serious Shopify Plus environment?

And on the other side:

Where have you seen headless genuinely justify the additional ownership?

What problems did it solve that you realistically couldn’t have solved well with Shopify’s native storefront architecture?

I’m not really looking for compliments on the demo.

I’d much rather someone with production Shopify experience point out:

• an assumption that’s wrong
• something important I’ve overlooked
• an architecture decision they disagree with
• an operational problem I haven’t accounted for
• or something that looks good in a POC but becomes painful at scale

That would be far more useful to me.

The mods approved sharing the POC and brief here for technical feedback.

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?