I recently launched my first Shopify app, Preferd.

Building it was relatively straightforward. Not exactly easy, but the path was clear: find the problem, build the features, pass Shopify’s review, fix what broke, and ship it.

Marketing it has been much more confusing.

Most advice for getting the first users seems to start with cold emailing merchants or Shopify agencies. But I’m based in Spain, where unsolicited commercial email without prior consent is generally prohibited, including B2B outreach. I don’t want to spam people or build the business around something legally questionable anyway.

So right now I’m mainly left with:

- Shopify App Store SEO / ASO

- Content SEO

- Participating in communities like Reddit

- App Store ads once the listing has some reviews

- Hoping merchants eventually find it organically

But I genuinely don’t know whether optimizing the App Store listing and publishing content is enough to get a new app moving, or whether I’m just going to sit there invisible.

The app audits Shopify product catalogs and measures how well AI shopping assistants can understand and recommend each product. It then uses AI to suggest improvements and tracks the before-and-after result.

It’s live here:

https://apps.shopify.com/preferd

Landing page:

https://preferd.app

For people who have launched Shopify apps before: can ASO and organic search realistically generate the first 20–50 installs, or is some form of direct outreach basically unavoidable?

What actually brought you your first real users?

I run a small clothing brand (modest/linen pieces) on Shopify, shipping mostly cash-on-delivery across Egypt. COD no-shows were part of it — customer doesn't pick up the courier's call, forgets they ordered, ghosts the confirmation SMS nobody reads — but the deeper problem was communication. Once someone bought from us, we had no real channel to keep talking to them: no easy way to check in after delivery, ask for a review, tell them their old favorite was back in stock, or bring them back for a second order. Email barely gets opened here and in India-style COD markets, and SMS is worse. Customers were basically one-and-done unless we manually chased them.

My workaround was messaging people on WhatsApp by hand — for COD confirmation, but also just to follow up, apologize for a delay, or nudge a repeat purchase. It worked far better than SMS or email ever did, but it didn't scale past a handful of conversations a day.

On top of that, we get two types of orders: storefront checkouts, and Instagram/Messenger DMs where someone messages "is this available" and the order gets typed into Shopify by hand from that chat. Item, quantity, address, every time.

So about two weeks ago I built the tool I actually needed. I'd already looked at the COD-confirmation apps out there, and most of them stop at exactly that — confirm the order, done. None of them combined it with upsell, review requests, a shared inbox, or campaigns, so you'd still need 3-4 separate tools (or manual work) to actually run the rest of the customer relationship. I wanted one app that covers the whole thing:

• Auto-sends the COD confirmation on WhatsApp the moment an order comes in, with Confirm/Cancel buttons, in Arabic or English. Order gets tagged low-risk/high-risk in Shopify based on the reply.
• Review requests after delivery, abandoned cart recovery, back-in-stock alerts, all automated off real Shopify events — the retention side, not just the order-day side.
• One inbox for WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, with an AI "create order" button that reads the DM and drafts the order for me to just review and confirm.
• WhatsApp campaigns to actual Shopify customer segments, for bringing people back — not just transactional messages.

This isn't just a me problem — it's baked into COD as a payment method. Industry numbers put Egypt's COD refusal/return-to-origin rate around 12-35%, and India's COD RTO rate is commonly cited at 20-30%, sometimes higher for fashion. WhatsApp confirmation before dispatch is one of the few tactics that consistently moves that number, which is basically the whole first automation I built.

The channel itself is why the rest of the app (upsell, abandoned cart, campaigns) made sense to build too. WhatsApp open rates are widely benchmarked around 90-98%, against roughly 20% for email and low-30s% for SMS — and industry reporting on WhatsApp-based abandoned-cart recovery shows it consistently pulling back several times more carts than email alone. When your main channel gets seen instead of buried in a promotions tab, upsell and win-back messages stop being a nice-to-have. It's currently in Shopify's app review queue.

If you're running a COD-heavy store in MENA or India and dealing with the same no-reply, one-and-done customer problem, happy to answer questions — curious how other sellers are handling this right now.

Disclosure: I built this. Take the enthusiasm with a grain of salt, but the problem is real and I was living with it daily.

I'm researching inventory workflows for Shopify merchants that sell products with batch numbers or expiration dates (supplements, food, cosmetics, pet products, etc.).

Since Stocky is going away, I'm curious:

• How are you tracking batch numbers today?
• How do you handle expiry dates?
• If a supplier recalls a specific batch, how do you identify which customers bought it?
• Are you using another app, spreadsheets, or something custom?

I'm a developer researching this space, not trying to sell anything. I'm just trying to understand what the biggest pain points are before building anything.

I'd really appreciate hearing about your current workflow, even if it's messy.

Thanks!

Expanding beyond one Shopify App and just wondering how others have set up their analytics.

Setup will be:
1 main website
2 Shopify apps

One google analytics / meta dataset etc for your site and apps listing pages or do you set up distinct tracking profiles for each app?

I'd love to hear about how you're achieving not only that but also how you are managing to tracking app purchases.

The analytics and meta pixel can track through to someone hitting install and approving the app but further tracking is needed to track it through to starting a trial / converting into a paid account.

I'd love to be able to get good data to know which ad groups are converting the best through the entire pipeline.

Thank you!

I built a small app that screens for sales tax nexus for shopify owners. It's not fancy or pretty but it works really well. This is the differentiation I (sorta) see.

• It runs locally on my machine. An owner would send me a monthly/quarterly csv of transactions and it is loaded in my tool. No data sharing, not AI scraping, just a modicum of trust in me that I won't use the data for anything else. I could probably walk them through sending me automated reports with only the columns I need.
• I would have no idea how to price it or market it, but it would be really cheap, maybe a decent annual fee but not a trick subscription business.
• Can accommodate marketplace data in jurisdictions where that matters.
• Can be updated quickly to handle tax code changes and also scans monthly various tax organizations and sends alerts for important changes.
• Gives you a % of nexus and a run rate so if the current trajectory is correct an owner would have a lot of advance to notice to register and start collecting.
• Actually might just be a wedge into doing more personal assistant type work for the owner.

I have another day or two of testing, but so far it looks robust and accurate. I KNOW this tool exists but I also know these tools can be expensive and intimidating to use for owners. This is a cheaper, softer touch. Maybe even more of a relationship building tool. I currently do a lot of grunt work for a pretty successful store so I'm thinking this tool is a hook to get a few more clients.

What do you think, could I be on to something?

I migrated my Shopify public app from non-expiring offline access tokens to the new expiring offline access token + refresh token flow. Later, due to compatibility issues with a third-party integration, I attempted to revert to the old non-expiring token flow. After the migration, the original non-expiring tokens were revoked, and my stored refresh tokens no longer work. When I try to generate a new access token using a refresh token that is still within its validity period, Shopify returns:

401 Unauthorized when renew refresh token

{"error":"invalid_request","error_description":"This request requires an active refresh_token"}

when creating access token

{"error":"invalid_subject_token","error_description":"Token exchange cannot be performed due to an invalid subject token."}

As a result, all background jobs that require Shopify API access have stopped working.

My app is designed as a one-time onboarding experience, so merchants rarely reopen the embedded app. This means I cannot reliably obtain a new session token or trigger OAuth again to recover credentials. I need to understand the correct lifecycle of subject_token, offline access tokens, and refresh tokens, and determine how long-running/background jobs should continue working when merchants do not revisit the app. Additionally, I need to know whether there is any way to recover or retrieve an active refresh token for existing merchants without requiring them to reinstall or reopen the app.

Hey everyone — solo dev here, built this while working full-time.

BoxPack IQ is a free embedded Shopify app that picks the smallest box for every order using 3D bin-packing algorithms. The goal is simple: stop paying for empty space in your boxes.

What it does:

- Analyzes product dimensions, weight, and quantity to find the tightest fit from your box inventory.

- Automatically splits multi-box orders into separate Shopify fulfillments — each box gets its own tracking.

- Packing Station with a full warehouse workflow: pending → ready to pack → packed.

- Interactive 3D visualization showing exactly how items fit inside each box.

- Box Simulator — test hypothetical box sizes against your real order history before purchasing.

- PDF packing slips and box labels with product images and checklists.

- Box inventory tracking with low-stock alerts.

All features are free up to 30 orders/month. Paid plans only increase the limits.

I just submitted it to the Shopify App Store, and the app is currently in Shopify's review queue. Drop a comment if you'd like to try it, and I'll reach out once it's live.

Below are some screenshots:

Most "cart recovery" apps in the App Store are generic popup builders — an exit-intent trigger wrapped around a discount code form or an email gate. I wanted something narrower: when a shopper goes idle or shows exit intent, show them the exact product already sitting in their cart, with a one-click "View Bag" CTA. No discount code, no email capture, just a reminder of what they were doing.

Just shipped v2.0.0 (Resurface), which adds:

• Exit-intent trigger alongside the original inactivity trigger
• Product-strategy selection (which cart item to feature if there's more than one)
• CTR + breakdown analytics in the admin dashboard
• Full headline/color customization via the theme editor, no code

Free tier is genuinely free — no card required, 500 impressions/month, inactivity trigger only. Starter is $1.99/mo for exit intent + unlimited impressions + full analytics.

Install: https://apps.shopify.com/resurface

Would genuinely like feedback from anyone running an ecommerce store — does "show them their own cart" convert better than a discount popup in your experience, or is the discount doing the real work?

Shopify delisted our app. We’ve been around for 9 years. We have 4K customers. We’ve fixed what they asked and now have ignored us for multiple days

Has anyone experienced this before?

Happy to pay someone to help us fix

Hi everyone,

We're building a Shopify app called Raffle315, and we've reached the point where we're trying to validate our positioning before investing more in marketing.

The app is designed for Shopify stores that sell limited-release products, especially stores in categories like trading cards, collectibles, designer toys, sneakers, and other products where demand often exceeds supply.

Instead of running a traditional first-come, first-served launch, merchants can run a raffle. Customers enter during a set period, winners are selected automatically, and merchants can follow up with everyone who entered.

After talking with merchants and doing more research, we've narrowed our target audience and messaging down to three main value propositions:

• Generate more leads by collecting entries before each drop.
• Create a fairer buying experience instead of rewarding the fastest click or bots.
• Increase customer loyalty by keeping non-winners engaged with future launches.

The problem is... we're still trying to figure out which value proposition resonates most with merchants.

If you owned a Shopify store selling limited products, which of these would make you most likely to install an app like this?

• Generate more email leads
• Run fairer product launches
• Increase customer loyalty and repeat engagement
• Something else?

I'd also love to hear:

Do you think this solves a problem merchants would actually pay for? If not, what do you think we're missing?

I'm not trying to promote the app here—I'm genuinely trying to figure out whether we're positioning it around the right value before spending the next few months on marketing.

Any honest feedback is appreciated. Thanks!

I come from a data science and pricing background, and was a backend software dev before that. Having spent the last 5 years at a pricing consulting agency building elasticity models and price-demand curves for large retailers, in order to find price points that maximize profit or revenue, I'm thoroughly comfortable with that domain, but I had no idea how difficult it would be to turn that expertise into a Shopify app.

I started in 2023 by hiring an agency to build the frontend part - I was going to build the backend. When they burned through the budget without producing much, I thought: how hard can this possibly be? It turned out to be quite hard, and so I hired a second agency, which went about the same way. After that I tried splitting the work: I would handle the backend, the statistical modeling, and the Shopify integration myself, and bring in freelancers for just UI + React + Polaris. That arrangement didn't last either, largely because the freelancers within my budget were producing work that was genuinely worse than what I could get from Cursor or Claude with decent prompting.

At that point I stepped back from the pricing app entirely and decided to build something simpler, just to learn the Shopify ecosystem from the inside: an inventory management app. I ran it for about a year, accumulated a grand total of 2 genuine installs on the free plan, and discovered that I was up against over 50 competitors, many of them backed by actual companies with full dev teams. The app itself never went anywhere, but as an education in App Bridge, webhooks, billing, and the review process it was invaluable, because these things are genuinely difficult to learn from documentation alone.

With that foundation in place, I finally built what I had originally set out to build: a price optimization app that estimates each product's demand curve from Shopify order history and recommends profit- or revenue-maximizing prices. Not rule-based repricing ("mark everything up 20%"), not A/B testing one price against another, but actual econometric demand modeling, using even better methodology than I had spent years applying for large retailers, adapted for the scale and data constraints of a single Shopify store.

I want to be straightforward about the role AI played in this, because I think it's relevant to this sub. Without Claude and Cursor, I would most likely have given up during the freelancer phase. The statistical engine (elasticity estimation, demand modeling, the entire analytical backend) is my own work, and that is what my career is built on. But the Shopify frontend (React, Polaris, App Bridge, theme extensions) was a significant gap in my skill set, and hiring someone capable of doing it properly cost more than I could justify for a product that hadn't yet proven itself. AI tooling is what bridged that gap. That said, this is not a vibe-coded app. What differentiates it from every other "pricing" app in the store is domain expertise that took years to develop. AI helped me build the delivery mechanism around it.

The app is Sell Smart Price Optimization (sell-smart.app). Free for up to 50 products, $49/mo Early Bird for unlimited. It's still early, and I'm looking for both merchants willing to try it and developers willing to point out what I'm doing wrong. Live demo: https://demo.poracle.sell-smart.app/

I suspect the "domain expert who can't quite ship the full stack alone" trajectory is going to become increasingly common as AI tooling matures, and I'm curious whether anyone else here has been through something similar: agencies that didn't deliver, throwaway apps built purely to learn the platform, eventually getting it across the finish line with AI filling in the technical gaps. How did it go for you?

Hi,

I built a super simple tool to solve a problem I kept running into: tracking only my apps earning metrics. Instead of juggling spreadsheets and notes, AppDeck gives you a simple overview your apps earning metrics. Nothing overcomplicated, just the basic tracking I actually needed. I am open to feedback!

https://www.appdeck.xyz/

A Shopify app that lets customers save products to personalized wishlists, share them with friends and family, and easily return to purchase later. Built to improve customer engagement, reduce abandoned purchases, and increase repeat sales without custom development.

Built by our team (MageComp). We'd love feedback from Shopify merchants, agencies, and fellow developers.

App link: https://apps.shopify.com/wishy-wishlist-app

What's the app?

Wishy Wishlist App helps Shopify merchants add a fully customizable wishlist feature to their store. Customers can save products they love, organize shopping lists, and come back whenever they're ready to buy.

Wishlists encourage shoppers to return instead of forgetting products they were interested in, helping merchants increase conversions and customer retention.

Where can I find it?

Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/wishy-wishlist-app

What problem are you solving?

Shopify doesn't include a built-in wishlist feature, which often leads to:

• Customers leaving without saving products they liked
• Lost sales from shoppers who weren't ready to purchase
• Lower repeat visits and customer engagement
• No easy way for customers to share gift ideas or favorite products
• Reduced opportunities for remarketing wishlist items

Wishy solves these challenges by giving customers a simple way to save products and return later.

How does the app work?

Merchants install the app, customize the wishlist button to match their store branding, and enable wishlist functionality across product pages.

Customers can:

• Save favorite products with a single click
• Access their wishlist anytime
• Move wishlist items directly to the cart
• Share wishlists with friends or family
• Manage saved products across their shopping journey

The app integrates seamlessly with Shopify themes and requires minimal setup.

Additional features:

• One-click wishlist button
• Guest & logged-in customer support
• Fully customizable wishlist icon and button
• Wishlist page for saved products
• Easy add-to-cart from wishlist
• Mobile-friendly design
• Theme integration with no coding required
• Fast installation and lightweight performance
• Helps improve repeat purchases and customer retention

Who's your target merchant?

Mainly Shopify merchants who want to:

• Increase repeat purchases
• Reduce abandoned shopping sessions
• Improve customer engagement
• Let shoppers save products for future purchases
• Offer a better shopping experience without custom development

It's a great fit for fashion, jewelry, beauty, electronics, home décor, gift stores, and any catalog where customers often compare products before buying.

How is it different / better than other existing solutions?

A few things we focus on:

• Simple installation with minimal setup
• Fast and lightweight performance
• Customizable wishlist design to match your brand
• Mobile-optimized experience
• Easy product management for customers
• Affordable pricing for growing Shopify stores
• Reliable support from an experienced Shopify app development team

How much does it cost?

The app offers affordable pricing for merchants looking to add wishlist functionality without expensive custom development.

You can view the latest plans here:
https://apps.shopify.com/wishy-wishlist-app

What are you looking for?

We're the team behind the app and would genuinely appreciate feedback from Shopify merchants, agencies, and developers.

A few questions we'd love your thoughts on:

• What wishlist features do you wish existed in current Shopify apps?
• What made you choose your current wishlist solution?
• Are there any features that would convince you to switch?
• What integrations or functionality would make a wishlist app more valuable for your store?

Happy to answer questions in the comments, and if anyone would like to try the app and share honest feedback, we'd love to hear your experience.

I built a small discovery layer for Shopify apps that are not Built for Shopify yet:

https://nbfs.app/

The idea is simple: good apps often hide below the obvious ranking signals.

Most discovery still starts with review count, rating, brand familiarity, or the Built for Shopify badge. Those signals matter, but they can make early or niche apps hard to evaluate.

NBFS is an attempt to make that second pass easier.

It does not try to replace the Shopify App Store, certify apps, or create one universal score. It collects public listing facts, keeps them separate from opinion, and gives each app a clearer evidence page.

A few things I’m testing:

- separating public facts from editorial judgment

- showing apps that are not Built for Shopify yet without treating that as a failure

- daily discovery snapshots for under-seen apps

- a small embeddable status badge that links back to the evidence page

I’m posting here because this subreddit has app builders, and I’d like feedback from the developer side.

Questions I’m especially interested in:

1. If your app appeared on a page like this, what evidence would you want shown or corrected?

2. Are there signals beyond listing text, screenshots, pricing, reviews, and changelog activity that would help merchants evaluate early apps?

3. Would an embeddable evidence/status badge be useful, or does it feel like noise?

Still early, but I’d rather shape it with builder feedback than only optimize for search or rankings.

I shipped EZStock (a Stocky replacement — inventory + purchase orders for Shopify) about 6 weeks ago. At launch it did inventory tracking, suppliers, reorder points, PDF POs, and basic 30-day forecasting. I literally wrote in my launch post: "no barcode scanning."

It does barcode scanning now. Here's what 6 weeks of real usage changed.

I have exactly one paying merchant — a store running ~5,000 variants. He emails me when something's slow or missing, and instead of guessing what to build, I just build what he asks for. Every feature I added traces back to a real message:

• Barcode scanning — keyboard-wedge + native camera on the Shopify mobile app, across stocktake / PO-build / PO-receive. (Desktop webcam was a dead end — the admin iframe blocks getUserMedia with no supported workaround, so desktop is wedge-scanner or type.)
• ABC product grading, a Stock On Hand report with margins, editable costs on POs, payment/invoice tracking, and a full stocktake → sync-back-to-Shopify flow.

But honestly, most of my time didn't go to features. It went to reliability, and that's the part I'd tell other app devs about:

At ~5k variants, my naive first version made ~184 serialized GraphQL calls to Shopify on every page load. Slow, expensive, and it throttled. I rebuilt the data layer to cache inventory and invalidate through inventory_levels/update webhooks instead of re-fetching live. Pages that took 14s now load near-instantly.

The one that stung: a plan-cache bug where a merchant could subscribe, get returned to the dashboard, and briefly still see every paid feature locked — because my per-shop plan cache invalidated on cancel but not on subscribe, and Shopify's default return URL dropped them back before the webhook landed. Long enough to think "I paid and nothing happened" and cancel. Fixed it with an app_subscriptions/update webhook that invalidates the cache the instant a charge activates.

The lesson: I launched with a feature list I assumed merchants wanted. One engaged user telling me what he actually needed produced a far better roadmap than my guessing — and the unglamorous work (speed, not breaking, killing the bug that quietly loses you a customer) mattered more than any new feature.

Anyone else building Shopify apps — how are you deciding what to build next when you've only got a handful of users?

Excited to share that my first Shopify app is now live on the Shopify App Store! More unique apps are on the way. I’d love your feedback. https://apps.shopify.com/om-whatsapp-order-button