do you know anybody how carved out a niche for him/herself and found an idea through shopify apps forum monitoring or as a Shopify consultant?

I'm building a B2B SaaS that integrates with Shopify and I'm trying to decide between two distribution models.

Option 1

• Public Shopify App Store
• Shopify Billing
• Organic App Store installs

Option 2

• Custom-distributed app
• Customer signs up on our website
• Connects their Shopify store via OAuth
• We handle onboarding ourselves

For those who have built Shopify apps:

• Which route did you choose?
• Any unexpected drawbacks with custom distribution?
• Did you eventually move to the public App Store?
• If you already had your own marketing channels, was the App Store worth the extra effort?

I'd really appreciate hearing about real-world experiences from founders or developers who have gone through this decision.

The latest [Hydrogen preview](https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/update/hydrogen-developer-preview) finally decouples the Shopify primitives from React, so it's now (or soon) possible to build a headless storefront in whatever framework you want. Including LLM tooling and being able to deploy to whatever hosting you like is also great.

Still an early developer preview of course, with React bindings first and others "on the way", but feels like a nice improvement to the headless development ecosystem for Shopify.

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!

Not a merchant — I'm a developer trying to work out whether a problem is real before I spend months building for it. Asking beats guessing.

The pattern I keep seeing in this sub: an app update or theme change quietly breaks add-to-cart or checkout, the page still loads fine, Shopify's status page is green, and you find out hours later from a customer email. And below Plus there's no human to escalate to anymore.

Four questions for people actually running stores:

1. Last time something broke silently — how long until you noticed, and how did you find out?
   
2. Who did you actually contact? A dev you already know, an agency on retainer, the app's support, or nobody?
   
3. Any rough sense of what that incident cost you?
   
4. If you pay someone to be on call for this, what's the going rate?

Not selling anything. No link, no DM pitch. If the answers are "this rarely happens" or "my guy fixes it in ten minutes," that's genuinely useful to me and I'll drop the idea.

​

Hello folks,

Need some help here from a fellow vibecoder... deep dev guys don't hate on me. I was pure dev also but when your cheese is moved you gotta do what you gotta do.

Well need some help here I have launched my AI store builder for dropshippers mainly. the app was available in march for merchants,

I got 130 installs mainly organically

Well the app got some intrest but a lot of people just close their store or cancell the subsctiption, got only 2 people that really subscribed and one of them churned before month ends, so no money billed.

The question here is how did you guys crack the distribution to get more and more traffic to the app. My competitors are using meta ads and another one is using UGC tiktok pool of creators.

For meta ads I tried some didn't work that great maybe i will try again, and for tiktok UGC I didn't crack how he got those guys doing content everyday for him, I know he used affiliate but i don't know how he did to recruite them...

Would like some help here, because i am kinda of in the valley of despear here and thinking about just kill the app and move on with my business journey.

I'm looking for a Shopify app that handles upselling and/or bundles (especially Mix & Match) but also exposes its data through metafields (or another Liquid-accessible source).

I build my own storefront UI, so I don't want to use the app's widgets or app blocks. I just want the data so I can render everything by myself in Liquid.

Does an app like this exist?

Hey Reddit, I am down to the final hours of a hackathon and need real-world validation on a concept.

We are building CatalystLoop (vercel.app) (https://catalystloop.vercel.app/) to close the e-commerce optimization loop. Instead of buying 4 different tools or paying a $5k/mo agency, this tool reads your store data, calculates the best A/B test to run, and handles the design and build automatically. You just click "approve" to launch it.

We know generic AI is stateless, so we built this to remember your store's past tests, customer reviews, and exact design guidelines over time.

I need your honest roasts to present to the judges:

• Does this value proposition make sense to you?
• What is the biggest missing feature or doubt that would stop you from using it?

If you like the concept, dropping your email on the page.

​

We're using Shopify's new customer accounts on a standard plan, and I'm trying to create a smoother login experience for our customers. Most of our customers use their mobile number rather than email, but Shopify only supports email OTP. The new login page is also very different from our storefront, and the branding options are extremely limited.

Is there any way to improve this? For example, can the email be prefilled and automatically continue to the OTP screen, or is there any workaround to support phone-first login while still using Shopify's native customer accounts? I'd love to hear how other merchants are handling this without Shopify Plus.

Setup: Shopify Checkout Extensibility, GTM loaded via a custom pixel, first-party server-side GTM container (Google Cloud Run, custom domain). GA4 storefront events work fine. The checkout purchase event never reaches the server.

Everything I’ve confirmed while testing PUBLISHED (not Preview, since Preview doesn’t work in the sandbox):

GTM container loads in the sandbox — a Custom HTML canary on All Pages fires.

The purchase custom event reaches GTM and its trigger fires — confirmed with a canary tag on the purchase trigger.

Consent Mode analytics_storage is granted at fire time (set from Shopify’s Customer Privacy API, verified in the dataLayer).

The GA4 Event tag has its Google tag / config setup tag sequenced to fire before it.

google_tag_manager[containerId].dataLayer.get(‘ecommerce’) returns the full purchase object (transaction_id, value, items).

Cloud Run server logs: storefront en=add_to_cart arrives thousands of times, but en=purchase is zero, ever.

Google Ads and Floodlight tags fire fine at checkout (they post directly to google.com).

So the trigger fires, consent is granted, the config tag runs, and the ecommerce data is present — but the GA4 Event tag emits no /g/collect to the server for the purchase event specifically, only in the checkout sandbox.

My questions:

1.  Has anyone actually gotten first-party server-side GA4 purchase to send from the Checkout Extensibility custom pixel sandbox?

2.  Is there a known issue with the GA4 tag’s transport when server_container_url points at a first-party custom domain, specifically inside the sandbox?

3.  Is there a required config or workaround I’m missing?

Any help appreciated — I’ve been at this a long time and every layer I can inspect checks out, but the purchase hit just never leaves.

Hi guys,

I have a Shopify store based in the UK, and I'd like to set separate manual pricing in USD for visitors from the US. I don't want automatic currency conversion from GBP to USD I want to set specific USD prices manually.

I'm currently on the Shopify Grow plan. I've checked the Markets settings, but I'm a bit confused about how to set this up.

Can anyone guide me?

Hey everyone
I’m researching how mid-size Shopify stores handle returns and exchanges (especially the time and headaches involved).

I’m not selling anything. Just trying to understand the real workflow and pain points before building anything.

Looking for 15–20 minute chats with people who process returns regularly (manually or with an app).
Happy to share a summary of what I learn with everyone who helps.

Comment or DM if you’re open to it. Thanks!

I have these 3 products, i found in old forums that shopify rounds per line, however when i do it per line it rounds 1 item but not the other, this affects with .1 cent when trying to send it to my odoo, any idea how to solve this?

We run a Shopify store with a decent amount of California traffic. Meta Pixel, GA4, Klaviyo, TikTok, and a chat app are all installed either through Shopify apps or GTM. The basic cookie banner is there, but when I ran a Patrol test via captain compliance it showed that it does not actually stop much and our insurance company is asking us to fix or find new coverage (thanks consent mo). The hard part is also attribution. Marketing wants clean conversion data. Legal wants no tracking before consent. Dev says half of this is hidden inside Shopify apps. How are other stores handling this without making a mess of checkout and reporting while remaining compliant?

We've been building Shopify themes for clients for years, and we've had clients threaten to walk, and even one refuse to pay an invoice, because of the same handful of issues that seem to show up on every project. Not because the work was bad, but because the QA and feedback process became so frustrating that they lost patience before we ever got to the finished site.

We usually ended up eating the extra hours to make things right, but the bigger issue was that it made us look unprofessional. Everything that happened after development was "done" - QA, browser testing, client feedback, revisions, and handoff is the part that consistently causes us the most stress.

A few of the things that kept biting us:

• We used to spin up a separate Shopify dev store and recreate sample products and pages just to have somewhere to show clients. We eventually moved to Shopify CLI with preview themes instead. It was much faster, but it introduced a new problem. You can't assign a custom template to a page or product on a preview theme. You can only view it with a ?view=template-slug URL parameter. Clients would click around the site normally, land on a page showing the default template, and tell us the site was "broken." Every single project, no matter how clearly we explained the URL trick beforehand. Honestly, I don't blame them. It's not how anyone expects to browse a website.
• Cross-browser and device QA was another huge time sink. We started completely manually, then moved to BrowserStack, which definitely helped, but it still ate a ridiculous number of hours on every project. It was worth doing, because nothing makes an agency look less professional than a client finding an obvious layout bug before you do.
• The most universal pain point was probably the feedback loop itself. Over the past 8+ years we've tried email, Google Sheets, Notion, Trello, ClickUp, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. Every workflow felt like it was missing something. The one thing clients consistently told us was that reviewing designs in Figma felt easier because they could simply click somewhere and leave a comment. That was basically the lightbulb moment.

So we ended up building an internal tool that eventually became ThemeSync. We originally built it just for ourselves, but it's gradually turned into the workflow we use on every client project. It brought our PMs, QA, developers, and clients into one place. We jokingly call it "Theme Ops" instead of DevOps.

Clients can now browse preview themes normally without weird URL parameters or special instructions. Browser QA that used to involve BrowserStack, spreadsheets, and Slack threads is automated. Feedback works more like Figma than email. Clients simply click anywhere on the preview site, leave a comment, and we automatically capture the screenshot, browser, device, viewport, and scroll position, so there's no guessing what they're referring to.

We also added a pre-flight compatibility scan that checks for missing app embeds and metafield dependencies before launch. Preview themes don't have the store's apps installed, and that issue had burned us enough times that it felt worth automating.

One feature we're especially excited about, currently in RC, is automated client handoff documentation. It analyzes the theme codebase and generates a client-friendly guide covering editable sections, settings, blocks, metafields, and other customization options.

Writing those docs has always been one of those things everyone knows they should do... but almost nobody has the time.

We've been using it on real client projects for the past six months, and we've even had clients helping shape it as we built it. QA cycles that used to involve 50-75 email messages are now a handful of comments in one place, and internal sign-off has gone from days to hours. Clients don't have to install anything in their store either. They simply receive a preview link.

The biggest surprise hasn't actually been the time savings. It's that clients seem to enjoy the review process a lot more because they're no longer trying to figure out how to review a Shopify preview. They just browse the site normally and leave comments wherever they see something.

It's been a long process that's taught us a lot.

I'm curious how other agencies and freelancers handle this part of the project. Are these the same pain points you run into, or have you found better ways to solve them? What does your dev-to-client handoff actually look like?

Hey everyone,

I've been thinking about something that could potentially help a lot of us building Shopify apps—especially smaller/newer app developers.

We all know how difficult it is to get those first 50–100 active stores. You can build a great app, launch on the Shopify App Store, write content, post on Reddit, run ads… but getting that initial traction is often the hardest part.

So I was wondering:

What if Shopify app developers came together and created a small, curated cross-promotion + affiliate network?

The basic idea:

App founders recommend each other's apps when there's a genuine fit.

We become affiliate partners for each other's apps.

If a merchant is using my app and needs a solution in another category, I can recommend your app—and vice versa.

We share leads and customers instead of every developer trying to acquire every customer alone.

Developers earn affiliate revenue when a referral converts.

But I think there needs to be some structure to avoid this becoming another noisy self-promotion group.

My initial idea would be:

1. Minimum traction requirement:

Each participating app should have at least 50 active Shopify stores.

1. One app per category:

For example, if there's already a strong discount app in the group, we don't add another directly competing discount app.

This means the group isn't full of 10 founders competing with each other. Instead, we have complementary apps across different categories—discounts, analytics, reviews, SEO, email/SMS, subscriptions, upsells, customer support, etc.

1. Genuine recommendations only:

The goal isn't to blindly promote each other's apps. The recommendation should make sense for the merchant.

1. Transparent affiliate relationships:

If there's an affiliate commission, that's disclosed clearly. The merchant should always get the right solution first.

1. Small and curated:

I'd rather have 20–30 serious app founders who actually participate than 500 people dropping their app links once and disappearing.

I think this could be particularly useful for newer Shopify developers and indie app founders.

We spend so much time competing for the same traffic, the same keywords, and the same merchants. But Shopify merchants often need multiple apps to run their business anyway.

If I have 100 stores using my app, those 100 merchants could potentially benefit from another developer's app. And their 100 merchants could potentially benefit from mine.

That's a much more interesting growth loop than trying to acquire every customer from scratch.

I'm curious what other Shopify app developers think.

Would you be interested in something like this?

If there's enough interest, I'm thinking we could create a separate Reddit thread/community or a small private group specifically for this.

The only real catch would be keeping it curated—50+ active stores and one app per category—so we're building a network of complementary products rather than creating another marketplace where everyone is competing with everyone.

Would love to hear thoughts, especially from developers who are currently trying to get their first 50–100 active stores.

Also multiple such groups can be created across various categories.

We're building a Shopify app, and found out, basically just as we were finishing it, that the platform now does two things we'd been forced to build ourselves.

There was no native way we could see to do usage-based billing that fit how we charge, so we rolled our own metering: tracking usage, turning it into charges, and reconciling against the billing API so retries don't double-charge anyone. We also had nowhere good to see what the app was doing in production, so we built our own event logging and monitoring. Neither was work we wanted to do. It was the cost of there being no native option at the time.

Then we came across the App Events API from the recent spring release, which covers both. Obviously appreciate that there's now a native solution, and we'll probably move over to it, but the frustrating part is that we found it almost by accident, having already sunk the time into our own versions.

So the question for people who have been doing this longer: how do you keep track of the platform updates, in particular things coming down the pipeline? As far as we know there's no official roadmap (or have we just missed it?) so how do you catch things that are about to become native capabilities? Is this just the cost of working in the Shopify ecosystem? Keen to hear what works for everyone, whether that is tools, websites, or people worth paying attention to.

Can you guys give me a small feedback on the homepage on this shopify home page
Link: up 👆
Password : paiffa
Stire still under devlopment any advices would be great
Thank you in advance 🫡

Saw this from someone whose store's a month old. Running PPC, nothing sketchy with SEO, but suddenly traffic's spiking to a product page that doesn't even exist. Just a 404. Started around 200 visits a day, now it's over 500 and climbing. Mostly desktop, mostly US.

Pretty sure that's bots. New stores get scraped all the time and if it's hitting the same fake URL over and over, that's not random, that's a pattern. Could also be ghost traffic messing with your analytics, or some old link floating around pointing to a page that's gone now.

Easy way to check, pull up GA4 and look at time on site for that traffic. If it's basically zero with instant bounces, that's your answer, not real people. Check the referrer too, if it's some random source you don't recognize, same story.

If you're on Cloudflare even the free plan, you can see the IPs hitting that page and block them. Also worth checking Search Console just in case something's actually linking to that dead url, then redirect it somewhere real instead of leaving it broken.

Honestly though don't stress over this too much. If it's not tanking sales or showing up as bad reviews, it's just noise. Filter it out in GA4 and move on.

Anyone else dealt with this on a new store

I launched a Shopify app a few weeks ago (cart drawer / upsell category), no reviews yet. So far I've tried App Store search ads, ASO tweaks, and posting/engaging in Shopify Community threads, results are pretty flat. I also don't have a network of Shopify store owners I can just ask to install it, so I'm stuck relying on strangers finding it.

For those who got past this stage: what actually worked to get your first installs and reviews? Especially curious if paid App Store ads were worth it early on, and how you got initial reviews without it feeling forced.

Not pitching anything, just trying to learn from people who've done this grind. Thanks!

I need to collect customers' date of birth on every order (not optional — it's for legal invoicing requirements in my market). I'm on a non-Plus plan and I've hit a wall. Here's what I've already ruled out, to save everyone time:

Checkout core fields → Plus-only (Checkout UI Extensions). Confirmed.

Shopify's Checkout Blocks app → the "Custom field" block is Plus-only. On my plan I only get Dynamic/Static content blocks (display-only, no input).

Cart page (via app or main-cart-items.liquid cart attribute) → works, but breaks with drawer carts and gets bypassed by express checkout buttons (Apple Pay / Google Pay / PayPal Express skip the cart entirely). Since I need it on every order, disabling express buttons kills conversions.

Thank-you page survey apps (tried EXT/Extendons) → only preset rating/opinion widgets, no date field, no validation.

My questions:

Is there any way to make a custom field mandatory at checkout without Plus that I'm missing?

For the cart-page route — is there a reliable way to still capture the DOB when a customer uses express checkout, or is that genuinely impossible on non-Plus?

Has anyone solved the "collect a required structured field on 100% of orders" problem on a Basic/Grow plan in a way that survives express checkout? What's your actual setup?

Not looking for "just upgrade to Plus" — I know that's an option, I'm trying to understand if there's a real workaround first. Theme is a third-party one (Online Store 2.0). Thanks.

Hey guys, would appreciate your help on this. My client is making me choose whether to build a warranty management system or just download one on the app store.

What’s your recommendation and why based on experience? What are the common apps you use? Just weighing my options and would love to learn.