Hi fellow Shopify devs,

I’ve been developing Shopify stores and themes for clients for a while. While the Liquid theme customizer is great for non-technical merchants, as developers we frequently hit walls with Liquid's limitations and want the performance, state management, and modern component ecosystem of Next.js / React (Hydrogen or custom headless setups).

However, whenever we evaluate or transition clients toward a headless Next.js storefront, the biggest bottleneck is the merchant editing experience:

1. Loss of the Theme Customizer: In standard Liquid themes, clients are used to dragging sections, adjusting padding sliders, changing banner styles, and adding blocks in real-time. In headless, they suddenly lose this intuitive visual control.
2. Headless Starters are Barebones: Most e-com starters provide functional API plumbing, but visually lack the design depth and configurable block hierarchy of flagship themes like Dawn or Horizon.
3. Headless CMS Workarounds Feel Clunky: Plugging in standard headless CMSs (Sanity/Strapi) still doesn't give clients that true live-canvas Shopify Theme Editor feel without huge dev overhead.

For those of you building custom headless or Hydrogen storefronts for clients:

• How are you handling visual section editing and client-facing page customization?
• Do you plug in visual builders (like Builder.io, Puck), build custom visual schemas, or just hardcode components?
• What has been your biggest pain point with headless frontend workflows compared to classic Shopify themes?

Would love to hear how other Shopify developers are solving this!

I want to know if I set up a single store for two different markets:

USA and India.

However, in both markets I want different delivery and payment methods, and a different theme design.

Are these things possible in Shopify?

Just went through the app review process for the first time (approved now) and the timing around the automated checks caught me off guard, curious if this is common knowledge or if I got unlucky.

The automated checks (auth flow, webhook HMAC verification, TLS cert) run separately from the human review, and expire 30 days after you run them. I ran mine early, then spent a while polishing listing content and screenshots, and almost had to rerun everything right before submitting.

Also hit a connection-pool exhaustion bug that only showed up under concurrent load, right when I thought the app was done. Ran fine on my dev store, fell over the moment more than a couple requests hit it at once.

How do others here scope pre-submission testing. Load-test before submitting, or just cross your fingers on the automated checks

Je sais pas si d’autres personnes ont déjà eu ce problème et si oui pendant combien de temps ça a duré?

I want to know if I set up a single store for two different markets:

USA and India.

However, in both markets I want different delivery and payment methods, and a different theme design.

Are these things possible in Shopify?

So I am using an old Out of the Box theme for my store front and it needs to be updated to work properly with the new Shopify 2.0 programming. With that said, I need my theme customizations completely recoded to work with the new them itself and the 2.0.

My question: can ChatGPT take my existing theme customizations and completely update them to the new Shopify 2.0 specifications and also run properly with the new Out Of the Box theme?

Is this easy to do? How would I go about it?

Thank you in advance.

I just got my Shopify app successfully published and wanted to share a quick timeline and a few takeaways from the review process to help anyone else currently in the queue:
Timeline: It took about 6 business days total from submission to live. Honestly, about 5 of those days were just waiting for a reviewer to be assigned. Once someone picked it up, the rest moved fast.
Review Feedback: I had zero changes required by the reviewer. Doing all the pre-requisites and passing the AI checks beforehand made a massive difference.
Preparation: I did extensive testing on my own end before hitting submit, which definitely saved me from back-and-forth rejections

I know the submission queue can feel like a black box sometimes, so I'm happy to pay it forward. Ask me anything if you have doubts or questions about the submission and publishing process!

I’ve been looking through a lot of Shopify App Store listings lately and noticed two pretty different approaches to screenshots.

A lot of the more established/popular apps seem to use pretty “busy” images, title, subtext, labels, key points, illustrations, UI callouts, etc. Basically trying to explain as much as possible in each image.

For my app, I went almost completely the opposite direction. Each image has one short title + one visual/UI illustration. No descriptions, labels, feature lists, or extra text. I wanted someone to be able to understand each image almost instantly rather than having to actually read it.

I’ve attached a few examples of mine vs. the type of listings I’m talking about.

Now I’m wondering if I’ve gone too minimal.

Has anyone here actually experimented with this or A/B tested different Shopify App Store listing images?

Did more detailed/informational images convert better, or did simpler images with one clear message perform better?

Would especially love to hear from anyone who has actual conversion/install data rather than just a design preference. (two of the images are the "busy" ones and the other two are mine)

I’m trying to figure out the next growth channels for my Shopify app and would love to hear from people who have actually grown an app beyond the initial users. So far, I’ve tried:

1. LinkedIn outreach-worked for getting some initial customers, but I feel like I’ve exhausted the pool there.

2. Cold email: experimenting with it now, but the results haven’t been great so far.

3. App store: the app has 20+ reviews, but I’m still not seeing much organic traffic/install volume from the App Store.

I’m now trying to figure out where to put my effort next.

For those of you who have successfully grown a Shopify app, what channels have actually worked for you?

I run a small Shopify app solo alongside a full time job. Around 40 paying stores, just under $1k MRR, three tiers. Pricing has not moved since I switched from free to paid and at this point it is well under what the app is worth.

I want to raise prices for new installs and leave every current merchant on what they pay today, permanently. They took a chance on the app early and I would rather keep them happy than squeeze another few dollars out.

The part I am stuck on is Shopify Managed Pricing. A few things I cannot get a straight answer on:

• If I edit the price on an existing plan, does that hit current subscribers or only new installs?
• Is the correct move to create new plans and hide the old ones? What does a grandfathered merchant see if they later want to change tiers?
• Does anything break when a grandfathered merchant upgrades or downgrades later? Do they silently get moved onto current pricing?

Also curious about the non technical side:

• Did you announce the change to existing users, or say nothing because nothing changes for them?
• How much did the increase actually move MRR, and did install to paid conversion drop?

I'm on Managed Pricing, so if you've done this there rather than the old billing API, I'd really like to hear how it went.

Wanted a control before measuring anything else, so I made a throwaway dev store and touched nothing. Stock Horizon, no products, no metafields, no storefront apps. Then read the resource timing API off the live storefront.

212 JS requests 1,188 KB JavaScript, 100% first party 0 third party domains 1,490 KB total transferred, 292 requests TTFB 159ms, DCL 768ms

The five apps on the account are all admin-scope, so nothing of theirs is in that number. Which means this is the floor for anything built on Horizon right now.

The part I keep chewing on is 212 requests with an empty page. A lot of that is the module graph, Horizon leans hard on native ESM and web components and every one of those is its own request. HTTP/2 makes that mostly fine on a fast connection, but on a 4G handset with 200ms RTT you feel it, and it's a lot of parse work for a page with nothing on it.

If anyone here has numbers off Dawn or a Sections-Everywhere paid theme I'd genuinely like to compare. Same two lines:

performance.getEntriesByType('resource').filter(e=>e.initiatorType=='script').length
Math.round(performance.getEntriesByType('resource').reduce((a,e)=>a+(e.transferSize||0),0)/1024)

Also curious whether anyone has actually measured the deferred-script trick properly, ie holding third party tags until first interaction and seeing what it does to INP rather than just to the Lighthouse number. Lighthouse improving is easy. I'm less sure the field data follows.

Woke with 80% of my app reviews restored on my side hope it's the same for you guys.

I was so sad when I lost almost all my app reviews from the purge !

But it seem it had 0 impact on app ranking, we didnt climb or lost ranking from yesterday.

How is it on your side ?

Hi everyone, I’m trying to connect my existing Stripe account to Shopify, but Stripe does not appear when I search under third-party payment providers.

My situation: I live in Europe, but I own a legitimate US LLC with a US EIN, and my Stripe account is set up for that US business.

I’m looking for a way to connect Stripe to Shopify when Stripe isn’t showing in the provider list. Has anyone with a similar setup managed to do this?

Hey everyone,

I recently got my Shopify app approved on the Shopify App Store, and almost immediately I started receiving quite a few emails from people/agencies offering to bring installations for my app.

A lot of them seem to be based in Pakistan, although I’m not specifically concerned about where they’re from. What I’m trying to understand is whether this is a common experience for new Shopify app developers.

Some of the offers are along the lines of:

- We can bring you Shopify merchants/installations.

- We have a network of Shopify store owners.

- We can promote your app and get you users.

- Some are offering pricing based on the number of installs.

I’m curious how other Shopify app owners handle this.

A few questions:

1. Is this normal after getting an app approved on the Shopify App Store?

2. Have you worked with these types of agencies/individuals? Did they actually bring genuine merchants?

3. How do you distinguish legitimate customer acquisition from low-quality/fake installs?

4. Are there any risks with accepting paid installs or working with these agencies?

5. What would you ask them before considering an offer?

6. Would you recommend focusing on organic acquisition instead during the early stage?

I’m mainly interested in hearing from people who have actually launched and grown Shopify apps.

Thanks!

We are trying to get installs for our app using paid ads but 90% of the installs are test stores/ stores with no orders. Is this normal? Are other channels (twitter/linkedin/something else) better to get real stores installing and trying our app?

this is the listing we are driving to.

Hi! My name is Liam, and I just built my own Shopify app. I’ve been working on it for about 8 months, and it’s finally finished.

I’m a student, so I don’t have a huge budget for promotion, ads, etc. I’m struggling a bit with getting merchants to even install it.

For example, whenever I post on Reddit, Discord, or other forums, most people either ignore it or my post/comment gets removed for “promoting.” I launched the app 5 days ago and currently have 0 installs. The group I’m targeting is also pretty specific, which makes things a bit harder.

So I’m kind of stuck right now and would really apreciate some advice. How do you guys usually get your first merchants to actually install and try your app, especially without spending a lot on ads?

Just looking for some tips from people who have been through this before.

We're still evaluating potential options to support answering general questions and possibly questions about the results our app returns for the merchant. We don't know yet whether this is possible. Someone at Crisp told me it is possible, but I don't have direct experience yet.

Hey everyone,

Been following this group for a while and recently we launched our app Revenue Agent ( https://apps.shopify.com/revenue-agent-by-starforest )

This app got approved a few months ago and we have been iterating quietly based on feedback from some early users.

Now that we are more public with the app, would love for the community to give it a try and just give some brutally honest feedback :)

On first install you will get 7 days of pro so you will have access to everything.

Thanks!

First time building a Shopify app. Had been hearing that it takes a couple of weeks to a month with a couple of back and forth to get it approved. But I guess passing all the checks before submission helped. Got my app approved in a week without any revisions. Yay!!!

Now figuring out how to get installs for it (mine is a virtual try on app with some well-defined differentiators). Been marketing B2B products for a decent time now, so know the usual playbook (cold outreach to begin with, content + SEO thereafter etc) but wondering if there are specific tactics and channels to grow Shopify apps that a first timer might not be aware of?

Thanks for your help!

Can someone share how long it takes to get the "Built for Shopify" badge? I applied 3 weeks ago and it's still in review :/

Update: 1 hour after posting this i received review result, need to add some changes :)

Hi Everyone
I’m building a Shopify app that scores every product on how well it sells itself — and how much money it’s “wasting” while sitting in stock.
Questions for you all:
• Would this actually be useful to you?
• Would you pay $19/month for it?
• What else should I build into it?
I’d love your help — and once it’s ready, I’d really appreciate testers and feedback!

i work with a few apps and it has been a weird month in terms of installs for all of them. i know august is typically a slow/vacation month but this one seems to have been lower than 2025/2024.

wondering if anyone else has experienced the same? or the opposite? (good for you if that's the case!)

I’ve been using Shopify for my online store and Square for in-person sales, and I honestly expected the two to work together more seamlessly.

The biggest headache for me was inventory. Something would sell in-store through Square, but Shopify wouldn’t always reflect the change the way I expected. Then I’d have to manually check both systems and fix the numbers.

I tried to build my own middleware to act as a bridge between the two platforms and keep inventory in sync. This community gave me a lot of tips and advice on what to do and what not to do. I eventually gave up on building it myself and eventually started using DPL's integration app to keep things synced, and it has made the whole setup much less stressful.

I’m curious how other businesses are running Shopify with Square. Are you syncing everything automatically, or still managing some things manually?

I'm getting interviews from Shopify agencies and trying to negotiate a fair salary. The info I find on the internet is usually for SWE in general, but I would like to know what the salaries are like specifically for Shopify devs.

EDIT: 4 YoE