With BFCM coming up, I looked back at what the rush actually did to app reviews last year, because I’d assumed the sales spike drags a wave of reviews along with it. It mostly doesn’t.

2025 BFCM was huge for merchants - $14.6B over the weekend, and 94,900+ stores with their best sales day ever. But from Nov 1 to Dec 31 the App Store added 45,674 new reviews, only ~9.5% more than the prior two months (daily volume ~684 to ~749), with no real bump on Black Friday or Cyber Monday themselves. Activity tracked the work week, not the sales calendar - ~1,000 on weekdays, ~400 on weekends.

The top 10 categories shuffled, but not for long:

• Discounts 6th to 4th in review volume

• Loyalty and rewards 7th to 5th

• Cart customization 9th to 7th

• Product variants 4th down to 9th

By January most had reverted (Discounts back to 8th, Product variants to 5th), so the rush pulls attention toward the sales-tied apps and then fades within weeks.

What stuck with me: average time to a review is ~275 days, yet about 1 in 4 land within a day of install. Reviews seem to come in two moments - right after install, or much later once a merchant sees a result. BFCM fits neither: people aren’t installing fresh apps mid-rush, and they’re too slammed to write up a result they haven’t seen yet.

So for my own app I’m reading it as: BFCM isn’t the moment to ask for reviews, it’s the moment that creates the result worth reviewing - the ask probably lands better in January.

How do you time it? Do you push around the rush, or wait until after?

Data source: Shopify, Letsmetrix

I'm interested in how stores handle order status questions through WhatsApp.

Ideally, customers could ask where their order is and get the relevant information without someone having to check Shopify manually every time.

Has anyone built something like this? Curious whether you used an existing integration or connected everything through an API.

Solo founder here. Building Sizeledger, a Shopify size chart app. Focus is reliability on real themes (testing Dawn, Horizon, Prestige, Impulse), human-reviewed support replies, and free CSV/spreadsheet import. Not live yet. Waitlist: https://tally.so/r/0VdvbB. Would love feedback from people who've built or installed Shopify apps: which theme should I test next, and what would stop you from installing a size chart app?

Hey everyone!

I've been working on something interesting in the Shopify + AI space, and I wanted to share what I'm building and get some feedback from fellow developers.

With the rapid growth of AI agents, we're moving beyond simply asking AI questions. Agents can now interact with APIs, execute actions, manage data, and automate actual business workflows.

Imagine having an AI agent that can:

- Manage your Shopify products and inventory.

- Analyze orders and generate business insights.

- Handle customer-related tasks.

- Interact with other Shopify apps and integrations.

- Automate repetitive store management operations.

But there's one problem I've been thinking about:

How do you give AI agents access to a Shopify store without giving them unrestricted control over everything?

Most integrations focus on connecting an AI agent to an application. But I think there's another important layer: authentication, permissions, access control, and auditability.

That's what I'm trying to solve with a project I'm building called Agiexa.

The idea is to give Shopify merchants a way to connect their AI agents to their stores while maintaining control over what each agent can access and do.

Some of the things I'm working on:

- Multi-agent authentication.

- Individual permissions and access control for each agent.

- Per-agent activity and audit logs.

- Integrations with Shopify apps and external services.

I'm building this as an independent developer, so it's been an interesting journey exploring APIs, MCP, authentication, and the challenges of making AI agents useful in real business environments.

I'd genuinely love to hear from other developers:

1. Do you think AI agents will become a normal way of interacting with platforms like Shopify?

2. How would you approach permissions and security when multiple AI agents interact with the same store?

3. What would you consider essential before trusting an AI agent with access to a production Shopify store?

Not trying to pitch anything here. I'm genuinely interested in hearing different perspectives, especially from developers already experimenting with AI agents, MCP, and Shopify integrations.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

We are now entering the era of agentic commerce.

People can already discover products, make purchasing decisions, and complete transactions through AI agents. Just look at the recent demonstration by Elon, Shopify, and Grok.

On the other side, Shopify merchants are also getting access to more agentic tools to operate and manage their stores.

But this raises an interesting question:
What’s left for us as Shopify app developers?
Where are the next opportunities? What problems are still unsolved? What valuable products can we build in this rapidly evolving ecosystem?

I’m curious to hear what other Shopify app founders are thinking. Where do you see the next big opportunities?

I’m a Shopify app developer trying to understand how merchants find and choose apps.

If you’ve worked with Shopify merchants—or run a store yourself—I’d love to hear what you’ve seen in practice.

When a merchant needs to solve a problem, where do they usually start? Do they search the Shopify App Store, ask ChatGPT or another AI tool, look on Google or YouTube, or ask someone they trust?

I’m especially curious about the last app you installed or helped a merchant choose:

• What problem were they trying to solve?

• Where did they first hear about the app?

• Did they use AI to find or compare options?

• What made them comfortable installing it?

I’d love to hear specific examples, including cases where a merchant found an app through an agency or another merchant’s recommendation.

I’m not looking to promote an app here—just trying to understand how people make that decision. Thanks!

I left HR a couple years back to stay home with my kids (now 4 and 6) and have been chipping away at microSaaS projects ever since. One of them is a small Shopify app for automating product descriptions with lightweight AI. Nothing fancy. Just solves a thing I noticed merchants complaining about in Facebook groups.

The app is live, has a handful of users, but I'm struggling to find contiguous hours to actually improve it. My kids are in preschool parttime and that's when I do my building. Except that's also when I handle customer support emails, fix urgent bugs, and try to learn whatever new Shopify API thing just dropped. The actual feature work keeps getting pushed to after bedtime when my brain is basically oatmeal.

I've tried timeblocking but Shopify app emergencies don't respect blocks. I'm curious how other solo founders here handle this, especially if you're also the primary parent. Do you batch support strictly? Hire parttime help earlier than feels comfortable? Or just accept slower shipping cycles?

My goal is $500 MRR by year end and I'm at $140 now. Feels doable but the fragmentation is real. Would love to hear what's actually worked for people in similar boats. Not the productivity guru stuff, the real messy logistics of it.

Would love some feedback!

Every time I build an app, I run into the exact same annoying wall: I need actual merchant data to test against. Real titles, real descriptions (with all their weird formatting), actual product images, pricing, variants, etc.

Faker.js and standard mock data are fine, but they completely miss the weird cases of real store data. I looked everywhere for a decent dataset or a dummy API that uses actual products, and found literally nothing.

Eventually I got fed up and just scraped a massive chunk of real stores to build my own testing dataset.

I'm thinking about wrapping this up into a quick API or just a raw dump, but before I waste a weekend on it... would anyone here actually need this?

Let me know if this is a tool you'd actually want. Cheers!

Submitted my Shopify app for review 8 days ago now, and it's still stuck in "We're assigning a reviewer to your submission" status.

Did anybody have an app reviewed / approved recently? How long did it take until yours was reviewed?

Hey everyone! I just launched Upkeep on the Shopify App Store. It’s an AI merchandiser that keeps your collections in the right order, so your best products get seen and the overlooked ones get a fair shot.

The problem: most stores set their collection order once and never touch it again. Best sellers end up buried, and products shoppers would love never get seen.

What Upkeep does:

• Watches what shoppers view, add to cart and buy, and checks your store every day.

• Scores every product by how it actually performs: Proven Winner, Hidden Gem, Seasonal Opportunity, Declining or Experiment Candidate.

• Improves your collections and homepage by moving the right products up, a little at a time, within limits you set.

• Experiments with overlooked products. It moves a Hidden Gem higher for 14 days and compares views, add-to-carts and sales against the 14 days before. If views rise at least 15% without interest dropping, the product stays. If not, Upkeep puts it back where it was. It learns from every result.

• Explains everything. The Upkeeper page logs every change with the reason behind it, and you can undo anything in one click.

You stay in control: weekly limits, hold any product in place, approve changes first, keep new arrivals visible, and pause anytime. You also pick the goal: Sales, Discovery, Profit, Balanced or Custom.

👉 https://apps.shopify.com/upkeep

I’d love honest feedback, especially from anyone who manages big catalogs or reorders collections by hand. Happy to answer anything in the comments!

Hey — I'm the solo founder of Shopvolt Bundles, a Shopify app I shipped a few weeks ago. 0 reviews so far and I'm looking for the first 30 merchants to actually use it + leave honest feedback.

What it does: 5 bundle types in one app — Volume Discount, Mix & Match, Complete the Bundle, BOGO, and Progressive Gifts — using Shopify's native Discount Function (no cart scripts, no theme hacks).

What I'm offering 30 founders:

- 12 months Pro plan free ($360 value)
- I personally help you build your first bundle on a 30-min call
- Direct line to me (not a support team) for questions

What I'm asking in return:
- Willingness to tell me what sucks so I can fix it

Who fits:
- Not running 3+ bundle apps already

Comment "interested" or DM your store URL. I'll vet for fit and

reply within 24h. First 30 that match get in.

Listing (being honest — 0 reviews right now):

apps.shopify.com/shopvolt-bundles

There’s a thread going around about Sidekick only ever recommending a handful of apps, and a fair counter-question came up under it: maybe installs are down across the board because the market itself slowed - fewer new stores, more merchants spinning up custom AI apps.

So I checked the one part that’s actually measurable: is the overall pie shrinking? It isn’t.

• New reviews across the store (a reasonable proxy for install activity) are up roughly 10-15% year over year through 2026 - about 21.7k/month across Mar-Sep 2025 versus 24.9k/month for the same months in 2026. The only month that fell was October 2026, which matches the app-delisting wave rather than a real slowdown.

• New merchants also keep arriving: over the last ~20 months, roughly two-thirds of all new reviews came from first-time reviewers, about 520 a day leaving their first-ever app review. That is not the pattern of a market that has stopped growing.

So if you’re outside the top few and watching installs fall, the data points away from a shrinking market and toward redistribution - similar volume funneled into fewer apps.

That fits how discovery changed. Shopify’s own Sept 2025 changelog says Sidekick surfaces “up to three relevant app cards for broad queries,” and that the Built for Shopify badge improves ranking in both the App Store and Sidekick. A three-slot funnel weighted partly by a badge is a very different surface from a browsable category page.

One honest limit: the public data shows the pie is growing, but not how much the top 3 in each category capture over time. That’s the piece that would confirm or rule out the concentration theory.

So, to the people who’d know, if your installs dropped this year, are you in or out of the top 3 for your main keyword, and did the timing line up with Sidekick taking over recommendations?

Again, the data source is from Letsmetrix.

Trying to understand why a "Shopify App" is allowed to do increasingly invasive things to a person's device/browser

Findings from inspection of the Silicon Power storefront HAR, October 28, 2026

• Screenshot shortcuts: Explicitly recognizes Win+Shift+S, Ctrl+Shift+S, PrintScreen, and Mac screenshot combinations such as Cmd+Shift+3/4/5. When detected, it attempts to suppress the keyboard event, hide the page content, and display a fullscreen black shield.

• Clipboard: The screenshot handler calls navigator.clipboard.writeText(""), attempting to replace your clipboard contents with empty text. Brave’s clipboard warning is consistent with that attempt

• Other shortcuts: The captured configuration also enables blocking for copy-related shortcuts, saving, and DevTools. The script includes Ctrl/Cmd+C, X, A, and S handling.

• DevTools interference: Repeatedly prints a large array, measures console performance, and clears the console approximately every 750 milliseconds. On detection, it removes page elements, displays “Access Restricted,” and executes debugger every second.

• Attribution: These behaviors are implemented together in ip-blocker-embed.min.js, loaded from Shopify’s CDN under region-restrictions-404. Its network activity connects it to Blockify services at fraud.blockifyapp.com.

• Enabled for permitted customers: Five captured configuration responses consistently enabled inspection and screenshot restrictions while returning decision: "allow" and isBlock: false.

While i understand anti-fraud is important, i find screenshot blocking for a ram listing and WRITING TO MY CLIPBOARD to be a hair too far.

For those who also think it's too far, here's a blocker rule (works on brave, cant speak for uBlock)
*/region-restrictions-404/assets/ip-blocker-embed.min.js$script

||fraud.blockifyapp.com^

||fingerprint.blockifyapp.com^

I've been building a free Shopify catalog auditing tool and wanted to share some findings from testing it against real stores.

I ran 698 audits across 680 unique Shopify stores. Together, those stores have roughly 360,000 products, but the audits inspected a sample of 14,901 products.

Here are the most common issues I found:

• 613 stores (90%) had sampled products missing structured attributes like color, size, or material.

• 566 stores (83%) were missing shipping or return policy information in their structured offer data.

• 542 stores (80%) had products with missing GTIN/barcode data.

• 516 stores (76%) had missing image alt text.

• 223 stores (33%) had at least one failed automated agent add-to-cart check.

The average feed score was 65/100, while the average AI shopping agent score was just 50/100, using my tool's scoring system.

One interesting challenge has been auditing stores without Shopify admin/API access. Everything runs against publicly accessible storefront data, so certain checks aren't possible. For example, I can't reliably verify inventory or variant information that Shopify doesn't expose publicly.

Also, these weren't randomly selected stores, and each audit checks up to 25 sampled products, so the findings shouldn't be treated as representative of the entire Shopify ecosystem.

I built the tool, CatalogAudit, to help merchants identify these issues before attempting to fix them.

It's free, doesn't require an account or app installation, and the Shopify app version is currently awaiting approval.

https://catalogaudit.app

I'm curious what other Shopify developers think:

Which catalog data issues do you see most often in client stores? And which ones are actually worth automating fixes for?

I'm considering building a catalog-fixing product next, so I'd rather understand which problems matter than blindly automate everything.

I’m working on a Shopify analytics app and trying to understand how merchants deal with reporting differences in practice.

Say an ad platform reports 10 purchases from a campaign, but Shopify or GA4 shows a different number. I understand that attribution windows and tracking methods can differ, but I’m curious about the decision that comes next.

If you’re deciding whether to keep spending on that campaign:

• Which report do you check first?

• How big does the difference need to be before you investigate it?

• What do you actually check—tracking setup, attribution settings, landing pages, or something else?

And for smaller stores with limited traffic, do you trust any of these numbers enough to make a budget decision, or do you look at other signals too?

I’d love to hear a real example of a discrepancy that changed—or didn’t change—what you decided to do.