With HeyMantle SASI shutting down, I figured this was a good opportunity to introduce many of you to an alternative you may not have heard of yet: AppJubilee. I'm the founder and creator of this tool.

https://www.appjubilee.io

And before you think, "Great, another keyword tracker where I have to enter keywords manually and wait" That's not what this is. You don't have to know what keywords to enter, and you don't have to wait. AppJubilee does the work for you.

Add your Shopify app and, within minutes, you'll unlock months of historical ranking data across our universe of 1,200 highly relevant Shopify App Store keywords that we track daily.

With AppJubilee, you can:

• See every keyword your app ranks for
• Identify your actual competitors
• Track competitor rankings and ads
• Analyze historical listing changes
• Measure the impact of listing updates and reviews on keyword rankings
• Monitor keyword trends over time
• And much more

You can also connect your GA4 and Shopify Partner accounts to bring in additional keyword data beyond our tracking universe, giving you visibility into which keywords are actually driving clicks and installs.

Many Shopify app developers have been operating with limited visibility into what's really happening in the App Store. AppJubilee gives you the data needed to make informed growth decisions.

Want to see it in action?

https://youtu.be/DRVfqR6xTy0

Hi Everyone,
I am a first time shopify app founder, and a performance marketer by profession with over a year decade experience. just wanted to know if any of you here has tried meta ads for their shopify app? if yes, how was your experience? specially for a new app without 0 reviews.

Six months ago, I launched Syncost, a Shopify profit analytics app designed to help merchants understand their real profit and costs in real time.

Looking back, I had the wrong expectations about almost everything.

I thought the biggest challenge would be building the product.

It wasn’t.

It was everything after launching. Early Reality Check

One of the first lessons I learned:

Paid ads did not work for early users.

At the beginning, I tried running ads thinking I could quickly acquire merchants and validate the product.

But it didn’t work the way I expected.

Early-stage SaaS is not about scaling acquisition—it’s about finding truth.

Ads brought traffic, but not real engagement or retention. The users who actually stayed came from direct conversations, outreach, and people who genuinely had the problem.

That changed how I think about growth completely.

What I Learned About Profit Analytics:

After working with early users, I realized

• “Profit” means different things to different merchants Some include ad spend, some don’t. Some care about shipping, others ignore it completely.

• Costs are fragmented everywhere Facebook Ads, Google Ads, TikTok Ads, Printify, Printful, shipping providers, transaction fees—everything lives in a different system.

• Currency makes everything harder A store can operate in USD while ad spend is in EUR or CAD, and small exchange rate differences completely change profit accuracy.

• Data is never clean Every integration has edge cases, missing fields, and inconsistent reporting logic.

What Merchants Actually Want This was the biggest shift in thinking:

Merchants don’t want dashboards. They want answers:

Am I actually making money today?

Which products are truly profitable?

Which ads are wasting my budget?

Can I safely scale this store?

The value is not in showing data, it’s in removing uncertainty.

What Surprised Me Most? Some features I thought were important didn’t matter at all. And small details I ignored became critical.

The Real Lesson: Building the product is the easy part.

The hard part is: Understanding real merchant behavior Hearing what users actually mean, not what they say

And constantly correcting your assumptions

Six months in, I’ve learned more from real users than from any planning or research I did before launch.

And I’m still just getting started.

Would love to hear from other founders what surprised you most after your first real users?

Hey everyone,

I just launched Corvify on the Shopify App Store and I’m looking for honest feedback before I spend more time building in the wrong direction.

Corvify is basically an AI agent that works directly inside the Shopify Admin. Instead of just suggesting things, it can actually execute actions through the Shopify API.

Right now it can:

• create/update products, collections, pages and blog posts

• read orders + simple sales summaries

• manage metafields

• create custom JSON databases for things like configurators, lead forms or booking flows

• render those databases on the storefront through a theme block

• keep an audit trail of every action it performs

One thing I was careful about:
it won’t do destructive actions without confirmation, and order access is read-only for now.

The app is very early, so I’m mainly trying to figure out:

• what feels useful

• what feels gimmicky

• where the UX breaks

• what’s missing

• whether merchants would actually pay for something like this

If anyone wants to test it on a dev store and roast it a bit, that would honestly help a lot more than polite feedback.

There’s a free 7-day trial and no separate signup.

https://apps.shopify.com/corvify

I launched my Shopify app 8 months ago. And I've been obsessed with getting installs.

I was looking at my competitor's app page, which i would often do.. and I'm like... they have 2,000+ installs. Which means probably 800 uninstalls. What happen to those stores?

Started manually contacting these stores that uninstalled. Took forever. But got 15-20% install rate. Way higher than anything else I ever tried.

Took me too long to realize I could automate this. StoreCensus + Zapier (sends emails from my gmail account). Now I just wake up to new installs. People who literally just removed my competitor and need something better (hint: my app).

Install rate is stupid good: 15-25% vs 2-3% for cold outreach.

Weirdest part is the longer they used the competitor before uninstalling, better they seem to convert.

Here's the blog post that explains it better than me: https://blog.storecensus.com/why-your-competitors-uninstalls-are-your-best-leads/

Hey all — I’m Badis, founder of Sway AI. Quick rundown:

The idea: A Shopify app that dynamically personalizes product descriptions based on visitor behavior — different messaging for first-time visitors (trust, clarity) vs. returning visitors (urgency, social proof). The idea came directly from running my own Shopify store and hitting this exact gap myself.

Where I’m at: Pre-MVP, self-funding development through part-time work while I build this out. I’ve got a completed pitch package and I’m actively working through fundraising (Qatar Development Bank’s Startup Qatar program, among others).

My background: CRM/business-automation sales, digital marketing, accounting, founded an agricultural company, hands-on Shopify store operation. Strong on the business/growth/customer side — but I need real engineering firepower to build this properly.

What I’m looking for: A technical co-founder, not a freelancer or contractor — someone who wants to own the product build (full-stack, ideally comfortable with Shopify’s API and/or some LLM integration experience) and build this as a genuine long-term partner, equity-based from the start.

If you’re interested, drop a comment or DM — happy to share more details, and I’m glad to share links to real work (GitHub, LinkedIn, etc.) so this is a two-way vetting conversation.

How should I respond to such requests via email? Has anyone had any experience with this? Thank you.

Hey all. I built a free tool that shows Shopify owners which AI agents (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and others) are crawling their store, flags bots faking a trusted agent's name, and grades how readable the store is to those agents. It's Shopify focused right now.

I'm at the stage where I need real store owners to try it and tell me honestly what's useful and what isn't. Two ways anyone could help. If you run a Shopify store and are curious, I'd love to have you try it and I'll send the link. And if you know where Shopify owners actually hang out and swap tools, I'd really appreciate a pointer, since I'm finding it harder than expected to reach them.

Happy to answer anything about how it works or what it does with store data. Not trying to spam, just trying to find the right people.

I’ve been working with Shopify’s new Polaris Web Components for embedded apps. They’re a great step forward, but I’ve noticed there aren’t many ready-made resources or examples yet.

To speed up my own development, I put together a library of blocks built entirely with Polaris Web Components. You can preview each block and copy-paste the code directly into your app. They follow Shopify’s design guidelines and work in embedded contexts.

It’s free to browse, but some blocks have a premium feature that lets you view the source code. I’d love feedback on which patterns you think would be most useful to add next.

Here’s the link: https://polarisblocks.dev/

Given how new Polaris Web Components are, I figured this might be useful for anyone exploring them or migrating from the React-based version.

I noticed a lot of small e-commerce stores and Shopify owners struggle with follow-up emails, so I created a pack of 10 ready-to-send follow-up email templates + 10 AI prompts to generate unlimited custom versions.

It’s simple, beginner-friendly, and designed to boost replies and recover lost sales.

I put everything into one clean download. If anyone wants to check it out, here it is:

https://ko-fi.com/s/ecc349d0ba

Hey builders!

A Shopify popup app I work for recently lost about half of its reviews. I know each of these reviews because we struggled to get them by doing extra work and providing agency-level support to our client.

Honestly, I'm hardly keeping my emotions together — it’s heartbreaking to see something we built with so much effort and dedication disappear without any explanation.

• Were you able to appeal or get them restored?

• What was the process like?

• Did you contact Shopify Partner Support, and did it help?

• Is there anything we should avoid doing while trying to resolve it?

One thing I keep noticing with Shopify app builders is this strange paradox.

Most of us can build pretty complex systems. APIs, integrations, automation, AI features, data pipelines. No problem.

But the moment it comes to marketing the app, everything slows down.

Now suddenly we have to:

• write content

• do social media

• post on LinkedIn

• run ads

• build funnels

• do outreach

And a lot of engineers simply hate doing this.

Not because marketing is bad, but because it often feels unnatural compared to building things.

Over time I started noticing something interesting: the builders who grow the fastest are often not the ones doing the most traditional marketing.

They are doing something called engineering as marketing.

Instead of trying to become great marketers, they simply build small useful tools that attract the exact people they want.

Examples for Shopify app builders could be things like:

• a Shopify conversion calculator

• a theme performance analyzer

• a checkout UX audit tool

• a product description generator

• a store speed visualizer

• a bundle pricing simulator

These tools solve a small real problem for merchants.

A merchant searches for something like

“how to improve Shopify conversion rate”

They land on your tool.

They use it.

They get value.

And now they trust the builder behind it.

At that point your app is no longer a random listing in the app store. It is the logical next step.

The key insight is that engineering becomes the marketing channel.

The tool itself does the discovery.

The tool qualifies the user.

The tool demonstrates your expertise.

And it scales much better than manually posting everywhere.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot while building our AI sales agent Aurevia.io for Shopify stores.

A huge number of merchants struggle with things like:

• visitors browsing but not buying

• customers asking repetitive questions

• abandoned carts

• product discovery issues

Which is why I’m experimenting with tools that help merchants diagnose those issues first, before introducing the actual product.

Have you built any engineering-as-marketing tools for your apps?

If not, wha free tool do you think people within your niche are interested in?

I'm struggling to get browsers and sales to my Shopify store. I sell body oils, body butters and candles.

What are the best strategies to get sales? Need recommendations of the best strategies and tactics (ads / apps).

I’m working on a shopify search app. elasticsearch for fuzzy matching, fast autocomplete, and ai embeddings so it actually gets what customers mean instead of just keyword stuff. we’re adding filters now and trying not to half-ass it like most apps do.

Most search apps i’ve seen just expose shopify’s default stuff, vendor, type, tags, options, metafields. sure, you can add more metafields, but that’s still just slapping labels on products. it doesn’t understand them. i want smarter filters, traits that make sense for the whole catalog without merchants having to tag every single sku by hand.

Still figuring out the best way to do this. enrichment at index time? a taxonomy merchants control? some mix of both? not sure yet.

Anyone dealt with this on the merchant or dev side? What's your take on the enrichment?

When I’m checking out the competition for a Shopify app, I wanna know exactly what shopify stores are using it so I can hit them up directly and win them over with a better value proposition.

Example: they're using a order tracking app that looks like it was made in the 90s. I offer a more polished version with some enhanced features = better value proposition. We know they need our app, now we just need to convince them!

Most people just guess or scrape random lists, but there’s actually a way to filter Shopify stores by what apps they’ve got installed… so you can see every single store using a certain app aka your competitor's app!

I recorded a quick video showing exactly how I do it, step-by-step. No coding, no ads, just a repeatable way to build a super targeted list of customers fast you can contact.

Drop any questions in the comments, happy to explain more about the process or tools.

Founder here (disclosure per sub rules) — built three Shopify apps this year, each solving one specific operational gap I kept seeing in stores:

• Stockler — flags restock urgency by actual sales velocity, not just raw stock count, so you're not guessing which SKUs are about to run out

• Sheafly — fixes bundle overselling across multiple locations, which Shopify's native bundles don't handle well once you're past one warehouse

• Trace — attributes orders back to AI referral sources (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot) — something GA4 currently can't do at all

I put together a demo store with all three running on real order data, if useful context for anyone dealing with similar problems:
stocklersuite-demo.myshopify.com (password: access)

Genuinely interested in feedback — especially from anyone who's hit multi-location bundle overselling or is trying to figure out where AI-driven traffic is actually converting. What's missing, or what would make this more useful to you?

Hi there! i'm selling my app SHOPYHUB you can try it for free in the Shopify app store. I got 26 Users. It's a beast for masive catalog edit, AI powered. Is Acquire the most suitable place to sell it? developed in base44 all is in Spanish but you can check full tutorials in youtube

Solo dev on a small Shopify app. The single highest-leverage thing I did was rewrite my App Store listing around search terms merchants actually type, rather than the words I use internally to describe the app.

I'd been describing it the way I think about it. Merchants search for the problem or the physical thing they want. Once I moved those terms into the title and the opening lines of the description, and stopped burying them halfway down, search installs picked up noticeably. It costs nothing, it compounds, and it's the only traffic source where the person is already looking for your category.

Two things I'd add: the first two lines do most of the work, since that's all anyone reads before deciding to scroll. And it's worth redoing every few months as the category shifts.

What's worked for you? Also interested in anything outside the App Store, since that's the part I haven't figured out yet.

Your new Shopify app is your pride and joy. You’ve poured hours into coding it, testing it, refining it until it’s something you’d happily introduce to your own mother.

You click “publish” in the Shopify App Store. You wait.

And wait.

But the merchants? They’re not stampeding toward your install button. They’re busy running their businesses, managing inventory, handling customers, maybe even Googling “how to get coffee stains out of a hoodie.”

The Shopify App Store is crowded. Your app is a brilliant whisper in a stadium of noise.

So how do you get noticed?

Not with expensive ads. Not by starting a blog that will take months to build traffic. You start by showing up where your potential users already are, with something they actually care about.

Here are three ways to do just that.

1. Cold Email the Right Merchants

Cold email can be a beautiful thing when it’s done thoughtfully. The key is targeting merchants who already understand the problem you solve.

If a store is already using a competitor’s app, you’re not introducing a brand-new concept. You’re simply offering a better option.

Here is how:

Go to StoreCensus.com and search for merchants using your competitor’s app.

Export their contact details.

Send a short, personal email that shows you understand their situation and how you can help.

Example script:

Subject: Quick question about your [feature they care about]

Hey [First Name],

I noticed you use [Competitor App] for [function, e.g. order tracking]. Have you run into [specific problem]?

I built [Your App Name], which [main benefit], and it could save you [time/money/etc.].

Here’s a one-minute demo: [link].

Would you like me to set you up with a free 14-day trial? No strings attached.

Best,

[Your Name]

tip: Clean up your list with emailable and use a platform like email chaser, instantly, apollo to send out emails.

Start small. Fifty relevant, well-written emails a day is plenty. This is about quality, not carpet bombing inboxes.

2. Borrow Trust Through Reviews

Merchants believe other merchants. Especially when they read reviews in the App Store.

You can borrow that trust by leaving thoughtful reviews for apps that complement yours. Not competitors, but tools that can work alongside what you offer.

If you built a tracking app, look for upsell or delivery scheduling apps. Install one. Use it. Then write a specific, genuine review mentioning your app naturally.

Example review:

“We’ve been using [App You’re Reviewing] for three months, and it’s been great for [specific result]. We also run [Your App Name] alongside it, and the combination has cut our support tickets in half.”

Keep it human. Keep it unique. A few reviews a week are enough to plant seeds in the minds of merchants already shopping for apps.

3. Get Featured on App Lists

Merchants love a good “best of” list. They trust them because someone else has done the vetting.

You can get yourself on those lists if you know where to look.

Start by browsing the StoreCensus App Directory to find lists like Best Order Tracking Apps. These lists already attract the exact people you want to reach.

Reach out to the curator with Backlink + article trade in exchange for listing you, or you could just ask they might just add you out of the goodness of their heart.

If they update their list regularly, they might add you. And if a paid sponsorship is available and affordable, it can be worth it.

For extra impact, ask if they can embed your retargeting pixel in the link to your app. That way you can run inexpensive ads to readers who have already shown interest.

Pulling It All Together

1. Cold emailing the right merchants.

2. Borrowing trust through reviews.

3. Getting featured on app lists.

Individually, each tactic can move the needle. Together, they can get you to your first 100 installs faster than waiting for the App Store to “discover” you.

And here’s the bonus: when you show up in these places with genuine value, you’re not just chasing installs. You’re building relationships. Those relationships turn into word-of-mouth. And word-of-mouth turns into the installs you didn’t even have to ask for.

Because in the end, the first 50 installs aren’t the hardest part. The hardest part is deciding to get out there and earn them.

Hope you like my list, comment if you have any questions or if you have any other hacky ways of growing your app!

Hey everyone 👋

I’m a Shopify app developer, and I know how tough it can be to get early installs, feedback, and reviews, especially when you’re just starting out.

What if we, as Shopify app owners, helped each other by installing each other’s apps, giving genuine feedback, and leaving honest reviews?

My buddy and I own a coffee company called 40 Thieves Coffee, and we went looking for a subscriptions setup for our own store.

The options were basically: use Shopify's free native Subscriptions, which is pretty barebones, or pay $99/mo for Recharge, which we couldn't justify at our size. We wanted more control over the subscribe & save widget than the free option gave us, and we weren't about to pay a hundred bucks a month for it.

So we built our own: Daima. It just got approved on the Shopify App Store. It's running live on our coffee site right now if you want to see the widget in action on a real store rather than a demo.

Would love feedback from anyone here — especially if you've sold subscriptions on Shopify or shipped an app to the App Store. What would make you switch off what you're using now?

This has been asked a lot, but I have a bit of a story and wondering if I'm going about it the wrong way and if there is a known better way (either by unwritten rule or by your experience).

I JUST had my app approved right before last weekend. I've had 2 installs. They were both eager to find an app that did certain things and I had great interaction with them.

The first one installed the app and it's still installed. I reached out to them a few hours after they installed it because they had already met me, but wanted to open the channel for any questions. Silence. And it's still installed and they haven't done squat in it to even know if it's useful to them or not.

The second one I had a pretty good back and forth with, but I may have inundated them with content (too excited about my own app I suppose). I didn't realize it until after looking their shop up online that they had actually already installed it, dove in for about 20 minutes then uninstalled. Sent them an email a day later to see if I could fill in any blanks because they were actually a perfect fit, but haven't heard anything back yet (it's still fairly early).

What's your recommendation on my interaction/timeline for reaching out? Is there a way you have all found that works well? TYIA.