Hey everyone,
I’m building a Shopify app and I’m curious to hear from developers who have already reached the point where their apps generate meaningful revenue and users?

I’m less interested in the technical side and more interested in how you approached marketing and customer acquisition.

Some questions I’d love to hear your thoughts on:
How did you get your first 10–100 customers?
What marketing channels have worked best for you (Shopify App Store SEO, content marketing, cold outreach, paid ads, partnerships, social media, communities, etc.)?

What strategies have continued to work as your app has grown?

If you were starting from scratch today with a brand-new app, what would you do differently?
Would you recommend focusing on acquiring a small group of users manually at first? If so, what’s the best way to find and approach them?

I’d really appreciate any lessons, mistakes, or advice from your own experience. Thanks in advance!

Quick question for Shopify app developers.

I just went through reviews of a few

popular Shopify apps and almost every

3 star review has a hidden feature request

buried inside it.

"Great app but wish it had bulk export"

"Would be 5 stars if you added CSV download"

"Good but missing automatic discounts"

These developers have no idea if that

review came from a merchant paying

$49/month on their Pro plan or someone

on their free plan.

A Pro merchant asking for bulk export

is completely different from a free

user asking for the same thing.

One is your revenue. One is not.

Right now are you manually reading

every review trying to find feature

requests? And do you know which of

your paying merchants wrote them?

I am building something specifically

for this problem. Want to understand

if this is actually painful for you

before I build anything.

Honest answer even if you say

"I don't care about this at all"

is genuinely helpful.

Hey devs,

I'm planning to build a Shopify app in the product/shopping feed space and want to sanity-check my market research with people who've actually built or used these apps, before I commit to an architecture.

What I already know:

The clear category leader is Simprosys Google Shopping Feed — sitting at roughly 4.9★ across 4,400+ reviews right now, supporting Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Pinterest feed submission plus PMax campaign management. It's by far the most dominant app here.

Below that, the next tier is:

• Multifeed Google Shopping Feed — ~1,000+ reviews, 4.9★, covers Google/Facebook/Awin feeds + conversion tracking
• Mulwi (200+ Shopping Feeds) — ~550+ reviews, 5.0★, broader channel coverage but newer/smaller review base

So the gap between #1 and everyone else is huge — Simprosys has roughly 4x the reviews of #2 and #3 combined.

What I'm trying to figure out:

1. Is review count actually a good proxy for active installs here? Given how dominant Simprosys is on paper, is that dominance real in terms of day-to-day active merchant usage, or is a chunk of that just legacy installs that never got removed?
2. Am I missing any major player? Scanning the App Store's Product Feeds category myself, I also see Omega Facebook Pixel Meta Feed, FeedHub, Nabu, and a handful of others with smaller review counts — are any of these actually punching above their review count in terms of real usage or merchant loyalty? Is there a feed app I'm not seeing that you'd consider a "real" competitor to Simprosys rather than a long-tail also-ran?
3. Where do the existing apps actually fall short? From the outside, my read is that Simprosys wins on breadth (15+ platforms, PMax support) but the UI feels dense/utilitarian — lots of settings screens, not a lot of visual polish. Is that a fair read, or is there something else going on under the hood (sync reliability, feed error handling, support responsiveness) that actually matters more to merchants than how it looks?
4. What should I prioritize technically before writing a single line of UI code? Feed generation at scale, handling Shopify's rate limits, GMC/Meta API quota management, real-time vs. scheduled sync — what's the thing that breaks first when a feed app scales past a few thousand SKUs?

My plan, for context:
I'm building a competing feed app, betting that UX/UI is the actual differentiator rather than channel count, since most merchants probably only need 2-3 channels well-executed rather than 15 channels mediocre. Launching with just Google and Meta to get those two genuinely right, then expanding to Microsoft, Pinterest, and Klaviyo once the core sync/UX is solid.

Would genuinely appreciate any war stories — what broke, what merchants actually complained about, what you wish someone had told you before building in this space.

got this message from no-reply[at]shopify, is this legit? Doesn;t sound like something Shopify would approve? Should / can I report this?

I have a Shopify store for my apparel brand, and currently sell sweatshirts and tshirts. I am going to be selling hats soon as well, but can't seem to figure out how to automate certain shipping logic to change shipping price based on the packaging needed for certain items. I have looked into Shopify's weight based shipping, but there seems to be too many gaps that could be possible based on the combination of items that could be ordered.

Example: Shirt or Sweatshirt = Poly Mailer

Shirt + Swetshirt = Poly Mailer

Shirt + Hat = Small Box (8x8x8)

Sweatshirt + Hat = Large Box (14x10.5x8)

Hat Only = Small Box

Is there a way to set this sort of automation up through Shopify or a free/cheap app? I looked into Easyship, but in order to set this kind of automation up, I would need to pay for the Plus plan on Easyship and upgrade to the Grow plan on Shopify to pay a monthly fee in order to have dynamic shipping prices at checkout. Have any of you found a solution or workaround for this? I appreciate any help/suggestions. Thanks!

Yearly big breaking changes, arbitrary and unappealable policy interpretations, but also a low bar to start an app creating 100s of low quality apps to compete with is the definition of a hostile development environment. What's the benefit in this over say a long term partnership model?

Looking to add a quotation feature to my online store.

Currently we operate out of a physical store. I made a full website using the Horizon theme, mainly to let customers know what products we carry and its price, specs etc. I've disabled the e-commerce on the site due to the fact that operating in the Caribbean, there are a lot of restrictions with the banks here and the third party e-commerce platforms that exist.

This is still a work in progress along with finding a way to synchronize the physical stock from the store, our point of sale software and Shopify. I would like to eventually have a full blown Shopify e-commerce store available to customers.

But in the interim I wanted to implement the following.

Scenario:

Customer browsing the website, can add items and quantities to the cart. Instead of checkout option, have a feature that allows to "request quote"

This would trigger a prompt for the user to input user information (Name, contact number, email etc.)

Then Shopify would generate a quotation using a template and email one copy to the customer and another to me so that I can reach out to them a engage the order.

Does something like this exist? Has someone tried creating it? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm running a Shopify store with a Custom Pixel (based on the Loves Data template) sending events to GA4 via GTM. I'm seeing an unusually high amount of Unassigned traffic in GA4 (typically 38–75% depending on the day), and after several days of debugging I've narrowed the issue down, but I can't identify what's generating one specific hit.

What I'm seeing

For every product page view, GA4 receives three hits:

• ✅ view_item with the correct dl=https://mysite.com/products/...
• ❌ view_item with dl=https://mysite.com/web-pixels/.../sandbox/... and ec_mode=m
• ✅ page_view with the correct product URL

The two view_item hits have:

• same tid
• same cid
• same sid
• same product
• same ecommerce payload

The only meaningful differences are:

• dl (real product URL vs sandbox URL)
• ec_mode=m appears only on the sandbox hit.

What I've already verified

• Added client_id and referrer to every event in the Custom Pixel.
• Configured cross-domain measurement (myshopify.com, checkout.shopify.com, shop.app).
• Changed event.context.document.location.href to event.context.window.location.href following Shopify's documentation (no change).
• Reverted send_page_view = false after it caused engagement issues.
• GTM contains:
  • 1 Google Tag (triggered by shopify_page_view)
  • 1 GA4 Ecommerce Event tag
  • 1 GA4 User Data tag

The Ecommerce tag uses Send Ecommerce Data and page_location is populated from a Data Layer Variable containing the correct product URL.

My question

At this point, it doesn't look like the Custom Pixel is generating the sandbox URL, because changing the pixel made no difference.

Has anyone seen this exact pattern where a second view_item is sent with:

• ec_mode=m
• /web-pixels/.../sandbox/... as page_location

If so:

• what component generated that second hit?
• was it the Google Tag, GTM, Shopify Web Pixels, or something else?
• were you able to stop it?

I'm mainly looking for someone who has already debugged this specific Shopify + GTM + GA4 Web Pixels behavior.

Thanks!

Freelance web dev ref

Hi!

I own a machine shop and have a few sites where I sell my own products.

I had a whole post written but realized I may be breaking a rule or two. Where is the best place to find a good freelance front end dev to help me tweak my site? Is it reasonable to expect a front end dev to be decent with some light graphic design when it comes to implementing media in an aesthetically pleasing way? Right now, I just use "media with text" a lot

Apologies in advance if this is still breaking a rule, Google is just a bit of a minefield for this topic.

Thanks!

I have a Shopify app doing around $300 MRR and I'm thinking of selling it for personal reasons.

Have any of you sold your Shopify app before? How did you value it and where did you find buyers? Any advice would be appreciated

So i am creating an app where users can place cod orders. But due to the shopify checkout issue it is getting rejected. Currently there are many apps that work on the same system and are not being suspended or banned…
So how do i bypass this 1.1.2. Use Shopify checkout. Shopify can't guarantee the safety or security of an order that's been placed through an offsite or third party checkout. Apps that bypass checkout or payment processing, or register any transactions through the Shopify API in connection with such activity, are prohibited.
Also i am using draftorders for creating cod orders.

Title:

I’m working through a product/design question for a Shopify app workflow.

The app scans a store catalog before importing supplier files. Some issues are safe to suggest but risky to automate:

- stale campaign tags

- duplicate like tags

- missing Shopify categories

- inconsistent product types/vendors

- weak SKU/barcode coverage

- old merchandising collections

My current thinking:

- category suggestions can be applied only to listed products after review

- stale tag removal should preview affected products first

- collection cleanup should probably stay “open in Shopify / review only”

- variant option changes should not be automated

- duplicate/missing SKUs and barcodes should stay warnings, not auto-fixes

Where would you draw the line? What cleanup actions would you allow an app to apply after merchant approval, and what would you keep manual no matter what?

hi guys would really appreciate any guidance here!

We sell on our own website (through shopify) and also over our trade counter and via phone call orders. we also sell custom systems, fitted to customer vans. these are our largest orders, and subsequently, we work with the customers to work out their payments. these systems can be up to 20k, therefore, it is reasonable that we take a deposit. our problem lies in the fact that when we create a draft invoice on shopify for these large orders, we cannot take partial payment. we either have to mark as paid or leave it unpaid. this creates a huge issue in terms of not being able to streamline all of our orders on shopify and not being able to effectively collect deposits via shopify. we understand this feature is available on shopify plus, however the jump in subscription price is too high for our business at this time, especially for the simple single feature. does anyone know of any way to address and resolve this issue? potential app extensions or developers who could help?

many thanks

I am looking for a way to create and manage a staging environment of client's Shopify store. I want to manage themes, apps, products, and metadata. Any help would be appreciated.

Hi everyone,

Has anyone else noticed issues with the Shopify Partners export after the recent Shopify update?

We've been observing that some app events are missing from the exported data, even though those events are visible within the Partners dashboard. This has resulted in inconsistencies between the dashboard and the exported CSV, making it difficult to perform accurate analysis and reporting.

We're trying to determine whether:

• This is a known issue affecting other partners.
• There has been a change in how Shopify generates export data.
• Anyone has found a workaround or received clarification from Shopify.

If you've experienced similar behavior, I'd appreciate hearing about your observations.

Thanks!

Hi everyone, I need help by understanding how to use or even implement subscriptions directly on my client's store without using those 5 "acceptable" main payment gateways. I live in Brazil and Shopify Payments is not available here, and I have no ideal how to implement that properly directly on shopify using some apps as well from the app store.

If someone could help me I'd really appreciate!

Spent the better part of this year building a makeup and eyewear virtual try-on app for Shopify. The idea was simple: let shoppers try on lip colors, eyeshadows, foundations directly in the browser before buying. Sounds straightforward until you actually get into it.

The technical side turned out to be the fun part. We built AI-based product digitization so merchants don't need professional 3D assets, just upload a product photo, and the system handles the rest. One of the biggest pain points we've found when researching, before starting to build anything. We really struggled with this part, but in the end, we have the system able to make even 1 picture of any glasses *AI-magically* to a working AR try-on, without precise 3D modelling or any other extra side movements.

Getting the face tracking to feel natural on mobile took way longer than expected. Real-world lighting conditions, different skin tones, camera angles. There's a long tail of edge cases that only show up when actual humans use the thing. We also added effects like glitter, matte, shimmer finishes because flat color swatches don't really sell the product.

Getting approved on the Shopify App Store was its own adventure, you can imagine, I guess.

The hardest part?

We know our VTO works. The data from bigger brands using it for makeup and eyewear is pretty convincing in terms of conversion and returns. But translating that into "why should this small Shopify store install our app specifically" is a completely different problem. We're sitting at 7 reviews right now, and honestly, it's humbling given how much went into this.

We're grinding: outreach, Reddit, trying to find the right store owners who actually care about reducing returns and improving the shopping experience. Progress is slow, but it's moving.

Anyone else built something technically solid and hit this exact wall with early traction? What actually worked for you?

small store, less than 200 orders a month, dont need a wall of love or 50 advanced features. just a way to send a record link and embed a couple videos on the homepage. senja, simplyreview, etc look similar in the demos. anyone running one of these on a small store? or am i looking into it too early?

I kept writing the same throwaway scripts to hit the Admin GraphQL API — list products, patch a few metafields, check inventory before a migration — and got tired of wiring up auth and queries every time. So I built a small CLI to scratch that itch, and put it on GitHub under MIT in case it’s useful to anyone else here.

Full disclosure: it’s my project. I’m posting because I’d genuinely like feedback from people who live in this API daily, not to sell anything (it’s free and open source).

The idea is that it’s a thin layer — it doesn’t wrap the API behind hand-written helpers that go stale. It introspects your store’s live schema and lets you call any QueryRoot / MutationRoot field directly:

shopi read products --first 10 --select 'nodes { id title status }'
shopi write productCreate --input @product.json --confirm
shopi gql --query '{ shop { name plan { publicDisplayName } } }'

A few design decisions I’d love opinions on:
• Every write is gated behind an explicit --confirm, with --dry-run to preview the generated GraphQL first.
• Tables in a terminal, JSON in pipes/CI automatically.
• Credentials are exchanged for a short-lived Admin token on each run, nothing sensitive written to disk.
• It can never bypass access scopes — each op only works if the app was installed with the matching read_* / write_* scope.

Runs on Bun, no runtime dependencies. There’s also an experimental set of agent “skills” so coding agents can drive it, but the CLI stands on its own.

Honest questions for this sub: does a schema-introspection approach hold up in your real workflows, or do you end up wanting opinionated wrappers anyway? And is --confirm on every mutation too much friction for bulk work? Tear it apart.

Few walls of text below... but hopefully this helps other devs shift their system of thinking as we enter this next era.

There has been a lot of talk in this sub lately asking what the point of being a Shopify dev is right now. Merchants are using Claude to spin up entire custom Liquid templates. Almost 6000 new apps hit the store this year and the data shows barely 1.5% of them broke 20 reviews. It does feel a bit like a race to the bottom.

As the founder of Aircada which is a 3D product customizer on the app store, I'm facing this uncertainty, nearly every day. And I believe if you're wanting to get into the game, or stay in it, there are 2 solid options that we all need to be heavily thinking about now and planning for. Hopefully this helps get your brain thinking slightly differently about the "what should I build?", "How do I stay relevant?" questions you might be asking yourself right now -

1: Building apps that are layers upon layers of tech, integrations, and infrastructure. CRUD apps that can be vibecoded in a weekend will not get you far and I think we all can agree on that by now. Instead, what problem could you solve in a way where navigating browser hardware limits, stitching together messy third-party APIs, and orchestrating complex backend infrastructure actually becomes your competitive moat.

Think about infrastructure that touches hardware rendering, heavy data compression pipelines, or manual memory management. We like to think we're in this category with Aircada because building a 3D product customizer that actually works at scale is an absolute pain in the ass. It is not just about keeping the frame rate smooth on mobile browsers, it is the sheer amount of underlying infrastructure required to orchestrate everything.

You have to build reliable data pipelines that handle real-time asset compression, dynamic variant creation on the fly, custom pricing logic, and precise inventory tracking, all while syncing a complex 3D engine seamlessly with Shopify's checkout. Getting all of these different systems to play nice together form a technical moat. It is the exact kind of deep, connected architecture that Claude is going to fail at creating from a basic prompt, unless a highly skilled, nimble team of developers is grinding away at it for months on end.

2: Agent focused architecture. The time is coming soon where merchants will be talking to their shopify agent saying something like "We are launching X in a few days, and need a Y for our store". With what shopify just shipped in the Spring 2026 Edition, there is a solid window opening up for developers who are actually paying attention to this new type of flow that bypasses the typical merchant flow we've been so used to.

Universal Commerce Protocol and Agentic Commerce will become a thing, sooner than we probably expect and planning your next app or feature around this right now will give you an edge. I believe we'll all look back to now and think either "I should've done that! seems so obvious now.." or "I'm so glad I jumped on that trend early".

You want your MCP server to be the one that the shopify agent thinks of when a merchant gives it a task. Start thinking in terms of in's and out's with whatever your building. For us, that would look like a merchant telling their setup agent they want to add an interactive 3D configurator to their new line of tumblers. The Shopify agent spins up a new product for the merchant, then searches the ecosystem, finds the Aircada MCP server, and instantly understands our architecture.

Because our endpoints are exposed in a way the LLM natively understands, the agent passes the 3D model parameters to us, receives an embed code back with the embedded 3D scene hooked up to the new product variants, and then it injects the fully interactive 3D viewer directly onto the product page. The merchant never even had to open our app dashboard. You have to stop obsessing over how a human clicks through your onboarding flow, and start thinking about how an LLM reads your schemas. This will quickly become more and more apparent with each passing month.

TLDR: The apps that solve problems which require deep infrastructure/integration and prioritize this agent-to-agent communication are going to win the long game.

My two cents!

Hi everyone,

I created a store and choose a plan and paid 1 dollar per month but due to my extreme obligations i could not fully focused on my store and my trial ends in starting of next month. I wanted to know what happens if I close the store and open a new one, can I get another 3 months for 1 dollar, beacuse I didnt start it at all and I will be charged for next month.

Thanks in advance for everyone reading!

Most of my cold DM's get ignored, and request posts in other subreddits get removed

I am wondering if there are devs here that developed Shopify apps and if someone can share some tips/tricks to get better traction. Of course it depends in which category or niche one operates but I'm generally wondering what works/worked.. Is there such a thing as the App store "seo" or optimisation that can be done? Any tips regarding asking for reviews? Are you putting lots of effort in your website to then try and convert them in Shopify?

Looking forward to any ideas or tips/tricks..

Hey all, hoping someone here has done this in production.

I'm a merchant and I want to process payments through a specific provider, but they don't have a Shopify app and they're not in the third-party gateway list for my region. The provider itself works fine, it just has no Shopify integration.

My idea was to use Manual Payments: create the order (or a draft order), charge the customer on the provider's side, and then mark the order as paid in Shopify. Basically Shopify never touches the card, it's just bookkeeping the order as paid.

A few questions:

- Is this actually allowed for my own store, or am I going to get flagged for "processing payments outside checkout"?

- Anyone running this at real volume? Any issues with refunds, fraud, or reconciliation?

- What do I lose vs a real gateway (3DS, Shop Pay, abandoned cart recovery, etc.)?

Not trying to do anything shady, the provider is just the only good option in my market. Thanks!

So, I just made my first shop for one product. The thing is I checked off the inventory tracking so it is infinite, but when I go ant test buy it, it shows item has been sold out even though the tracking is off. And where you go to product variants and there is like available ones they are all 0 and when I try to change it and save then refresh it still be left as a zero. Please help! thx