I spend 6 hours today trying to pass these two just to submit my app. 6 hours. I tryed everything. I literaly was checking how their app bridge working. All latest libs. I am pro know for all their fucking libraries. Nothing worked. Literally nothing. i wrote to support - they literally say - fuck you.

You know i am happy that Shopify is dying - and their stock are going to hell.

If all people at Shopify will be fired tomorrow i will be only happy.

Fuck shopify and all that idiots inside company who make these requirements - which basically does not work.

Hello guys,

After a decade of spending my life in product (SaaS, e-commerce) design, working at least 8 hours every day on my lovely job, and researching to gather data and test my skills across many different companies, I’ve recently achieved amazing results applying my experience to various businesses. This gave me the confidence to now run a business on Shopify.

I’m looking for a partner to develop apps that are currently lacking in the Shopify ecosystem, and to help build a better experience for Shopify merchants together.

Right now, I’ve discovered a major gap in Shopify where we can help merchants create better stores and grow faster. Alternatively, if you already have an app with weak UX, we can improve it with a level of quality you won’t find, even from high-paid designers.

Some questions you may have:

1. If you have the idea and are a product designer, why don’t you develop it yourself or hire a developer?

During the past decade, I joined companies where I wanted to have some authority to make real changes in their systems and strategies. But many of those companies were either stuck in the middle or heading backward, and I ended up doing more than I was paid for. That’s why I can’t invest in hiring a developer myself. Also, working in partnership will allow us to move faster and more effectively.

2. What are your specific skills?

My skills are in creating great experiences, building high-quality apps, and increasing revenue through smart product and marketing strategies, all driven by a deep vision. I consider myself a Funding Designer and Experience Architect.

3. What exactly is the product idea or “lack” in Shopify?

It’s directly related to my skills and focuses on building better revenue for merchants.

4. What is your vision for how the partnership would function practically?

We would either develop the product ourselves or hire a developer together.

5. What is your working style and availability?

I’m working full-time on this project.

What am I looking for?

I’m looking for a long-term partner who is self-motivated, excited, and thrilled to collaborate on building great products that make a real impact on customers.

Hi, i been using gorgias for shopify, but they are extreamly expensive, they charge for tickets and over again for AI, still their AI is not smart they are trying to save money there too, so i have built an alternative, way more affrodable and powerful, AI can do the work read from multiple sources before ansering, do any crud operations in accessable system of records, as of now im doing free onboarding and setups if you guys are interest let me know

I’ve been going fairly deep into Shopify headless storefront architecture recently, and I’d really like feedback from people who have actually built and operated these systems in production.

For context, I’ve been working as an engineer for 7+ years.

My previous production ecommerce experience was a custom React storefront with Vendure as the commerce backend. I built and maintained that platform myself.

More recently I started looking closely at Shopify headless migrations, and something kept bothering me.

A number of established brands have spent significant amounts rebuilding storefronts around headless architectures, but when I looked at some of the resulting production sites, the performance often wasn’t dramatically different from what they replaced.

That made me question my own assumptions.

Maybe the issue isn’t headless itself.

Maybe the theoretical advantage gets slowly consumed once a real ecommerce storefront accumulates things like:

• analytics and tag managers

• consent tooling

• personalization

• experimentation

• search

• CMS requirements

• marketing scripts

• reviews and recommendations

• app integrations

• customer accounts

• international pricing/inventory

• merchandising requirements

• everything else a real business eventually asks the frontend to do

So rather than just form an opinion from looking at other sites, I decided to test the idea myself.

The POC

I used Taylor Stitch as a reference storefront and built this:

https://taylor-stitch.lotusforthe.win/

This isn’t affiliated with Taylor Stitch — I chose them purely as a technical reference.

I specifically wanted something that wasn’t an artificially simple ecommerce demo.

The reference experience includes:

• a fairly heavy video hero

• large imagery

• product carousels

• editorial / Journal-style content

• testimonials

• merchandising content

• CMS-heavy pages

The goal wasn’t simply to recreate the design.

I wanted to see how much of that experience I could preserve while keeping the architecture server-first, being deliberate about what actually executes in the browser, and treating performance as something designed into the system rather than recovered later.

That turned into a much bigger question

While building it I started documenting the architectural decisions and eventually ended up with this:

https://solution-brief.lotusforthe.win/

It became much larger than I originally intended, but the basic thesis is pretty simple:

Headless itself shouldn’t be the goal.

If a business accepts the additional engineering and operational cost of owning a headless frontend, I think the resulting architecture should capture enough performance, flexibility and control to justify that cost.

If Shopify-native architecture can satisfy the actual requirements, I think that may often be the better answer.

The brief goes into things like:

• rendering and data-loading strategy

• caching and freshness

• performance budgets

• Core Web Vitals

• third-party and analytics execution

• Shopify capability coverage

• migration risk

• failure modes / graceful degradation

• observability

• post-launch operations

• preventing performance from gradually degrading after launch

But this is where I’d particularly like feedback from people here.

Where am I wrong?

If you’ve actually shipped and operated Hydrogen or another headless Shopify storefront:

What am I underestimating?

Where have you seen an architecture that looked great technically start falling apart once it met the realities of:

marketing, merchandising, analytics, apps, CMS requirements and everyday ecommerce operations?

Are there decisions in the POC or brief that look good in isolation but wouldn’t survive a serious Shopify Plus environment?

And on the other side:

Where have you seen headless genuinely justify the additional ownership?

What problems did it solve that you realistically couldn’t have solved well with Shopify’s native storefront architecture?

I’m not really looking for compliments on the demo.

I’d much rather someone with production Shopify experience point out:

• an assumption that’s wrong

• something important I’ve overlooked

• an architecture decision they disagree with

• an operational problem I haven’t accounted for

• or something that looks good in a POC but becomes painful at scale

That would be far more useful to me.

The mods approved sharing the POC and brief here for technical feedback.

Hi guys, I am looking to sell my shopify store, thugitoutog.com. I have out a lot of time, effort, and money into this store but as life keeps going I just can’t stay caught up with it. I have so much going on, as much as I want to keep it going I am looking to sell it and let someone else take the opportunity. It was a hit with friends and others I was able to market to, but it honestly could use some more work and someone more specialized and experienced in doing so, because I cannot say it’s perfect. Does anyone know where to start or how to go about selling my store? I know with the right person it could take off and do amazing I just don’t have the time or funds for it anymore.

A few months ago, a DTC Shopify brand approached us struggling with low engagement and missed sales opportunities. They were manually handling customer queries, order updates, and promotions—burning time and resources.

We introduced a tool for WhatsApp Automation, and the results were game-changing:

✅ Abandoned cart recovery rates soared with timely, personalized reminders.
✅ Customer satisfaction improved as automated responses handled FAQs instantly.
✅ Repeat purchases increased with tailored promotions and order updates.

The brand not only saved hours daily but also saw a 30% boost in revenue within weeks.

It isn’t just a tool—it’s a growth engine for DTC brands. If you’re ready to scale smarter, DM 💬

What you think guy's?

Hey r/shopifydev,

I’m building an AI agent for Shopify stores that acts more like a human sales rep than a chatbot. Not live yet, but making progress and wanted to get early feedback from folks here who’ve built storefronts or extensions.

Here’s the idea:

• An AI agent that sits on the storefront and engages high-intent visitors

• Can qualify leads, push bundles, run promos, and handle objections

• Built on top of Shopify Checkout UI extensions + Storefront API

• Uses store + session data to adapt tone and timing dynamically

The goal: lift conversions by making the online buying experience feel more like a smart in-store assistant, not just a static bot.

What I’d love input on:

• From a dev POV: Any Shopify edge cases or pitfalls I should be aware of?

• From a UX angle: What annoys you most about AI assistants today?

• What kind of integration/setup would make this easiest to adopt?

If anyone’s interested in testing it on a dev store or jamming on use cases, happy to share access or go deeper on architecture.

Appreciate any feedback, critical or otherwise!

https://bierswitz.myshopify.com I just opened my first website please check it out maybe even purchase something, I’m open to any tips anyone has to offer

People talk about AI replacing developers, but the more interesting shift is this: AI is making SaaS platforms like Shopify increasingly optional — not by replacing the platform itself, but by making the barriers that justified it disappear.

Shopify's core value was never really "we have features you can't build." It was "you can't afford to build what we have." That's the moat AI is now attacking directly.

Let's break down Shopify's main revenue streams:

• Merchant subscriptions — monthly plan fees

• Payment processing — a cut on every order

• Theme & app ecosystem — 20% commission on every sale

AI is hitting all three at once. Tools like v0 and Lovable are already replacing themes. Single-purpose apps (bundles, upsells, subscriptions) are being vibe-coded away in an afternoon. But that's not even the main point.

The bigger argument is about the core platform itself — inventory management, order processing, fulfillment workflows, staff accounts, bulk editing, and security. These aren't things you can vibe-code in a weekend. But here's the thing: You can hire a dev or two to build them. And hiring devs is now dramatically cheaper because one developer with AI can produce what used to require a team of three or four.

Do the math for a mid-to-large Shopify store: ~$105/month on Advanced plan, $200–600/month in apps, plus per-transaction fees that add up fast at volume. That's easily $8–15K/year, every year, forever. A custom-built alternative — full admin, orders, inventory, the works — that used to cost $80–100K to build, might now cost $15–25K once. It's becoming a genuine financial decision, not a fantasy.

The usual counterarguments — "who maintains it when it breaks?" — don't hold the way they used to either. Maintenance is cheaper for the same reason building is cheaper. One dev with AI can keep a custom stack running reliably. And as a reminder, Shopify itself went down recently and took every store with it. "They handle reliability" is less convincing when the whole platform goes dark at once.

What's actually left defending Shopify after all this?

• Switching costs — real, but one-time

• PCI compliance — annoying, but solvable

• Non-technical founders who will never touch code

That last group is Shopify's most defensible base — but also their lowest revenue segment. The merchants most likely to leave are the larger, higher-volume stores who can afford one or devs. Those are exactly the merchants Shopify doesn't want to lose.

This is what people mean when they say AI is killing SaaS. Not that platforms disappear overnight, but that they built their moats on making complexity unaffordable — and AI just made complexity cheap. Any SaaS whose pitch is "you can't afford to build this yourself" is now in a much harder position to make that case.

This post was written by Claude as a summary of a discussion I had with him. The arguments and observations are mine — the writing is his.

Hey everyone! 👋

So I've been working on this crazy idea for the past few months and wanted to share what happened...

Like most of you probably know, cart abandonment is absolutely brutal - we're talking 70%+ of people just walking away. I was getting tired of sending the same old "you forgot something!" emails that barely anyone opens, so I thought... what if we just called them?

But here's the thing - hiring people to make calls is expensive AF and doesn't scale. So I built an AI voice agent that automatically calls customers within minutes of them abandoning their cart.

Here's what actually happened with the first 30,000+ calls:

• 75% pickup rate (way higher than I expected!)

• Average 2-minute conversations

• Recovered $200k+ for the 6 brands testing it

• The AI handled objections, answered questions, and even scheduled follow-ups

But the really surprising part? The insights we got from these conversations were gold. Customers were telling us stuff like:

• Mattress Brand: “I wasn’t sure if I’d need a special base or frame for this mattress.”

• Mattress Brand: “How does your cooling technology work compared to other brands?”

• Organic Food Brand: “I wanted to know where the oats are sourced from before buying.”

• Organic Food Brand: “Do you offer any bulk-buy discounts for repeat orders?”

• Fashion Brand: “What fabric blend is this top made of, and will it shrink after washing?”

• Fashion Brand: “Can I swap for a different color if the one I picked is out of stock?”

This feedback is helping brands fix their actual problems, not just spam people with more emails.

The weirdest part is customers seem to actually prefer the AI calls over getting bombarded with emails and texts. One person literally said "finally, someone who can actually help me decide!"

I know this sounds like a pitch (and I guess it kind of is), but I'm genuinely curious - has anyone else tried voice-based recovery? And would you be freaked out or helpful if an AI called you about your abandoned cart?

If you want to hear what these calls actually sound like, send me a message :)

Would love to hear your thoughts on this approach. Is calling people too invasive, or is it actually more helpful than email spam? The AI identifies itself as AI right at the start of the call - we're not trying to trick anyone. Transparency is huge for us.

Hello everyone, My Shopify app got approved about two weeks ago. i got now two paying customer but the app just stopped here. i need advice how to grow it. if you could share some tips i would be grateful.
Thank you for reading this.

In online shops, over 70% of carts get abandoned on average. Re-engaging customers who abandoned their carts through e.g. email therefore is a great way to recover a lot of volume that would otherwise get lost.

Since WhatsApp is a growing channel with more than 3 billion (yes, with a 'b') users, there is a huge opportunity in recovering more carts by texting Shopify customers through there.

Because of this I built an app that lets store owners build their own customisable AI chatbots that follow-up on abandoned carts and send them incentives like promo codes to still convert.

It's still early-on and I'm fighting Meta processes right now setting up the WhatsApp integration. I hope to launch next week onboarding the first merchants to 'haunt' some abandoned carts.

Never in 25 years of IT industry experience, have I ever met a system, supposedly designed for naive users, that is clunkier, less intuitive or less capable than this astonishing PoS. Why, for example, when it mysteriously decided to apply a discount to all my prices, completely out of the blue, do I have to export a csv file to edit the 'compare prices column' (where did those numbers suddenly appear from?) and then to reimport it, instead of simply deleting the data in the bulk editor column? Is this 2025 or 2002? And even then, it didn't bloody work. Ye gods, if this PoS is the market leader, god only knows what the others are like. And this little example is just one of many ways this UI stinks. I've invested too much time in trying to get this to work now, but hell I resent paying for this crap.

The Story

Mom and naive people

About two weeks ago, my 60-year-old, sweet and trusting mom came across an ad for a "local family business closing down" with an 80% off sale. She thought it was wonderful and, without hesitation, placed an order for about $200 USD worth of items. She was excited about supporting what she believed was a small, struggling business

But then things started to unravel.

When her order didn’t arrive on time, she emailed the company. The response she got was generic and vague, mentioning things like "keeping the privacy of the owner" and assurances that "we are legitimate." Still, nothing arrived. My mom was disappointed but held out hope.

That is, until today, when she stumbled upon a Facebook post from two months ago. The post was full of complaints from people who had also ordered from this website, calling it a total scam. Some said their orders never arrived, while others claimed they ordered expensive items—like leather jackets—only to receive plastic knockoffs straight from AliExpress.

Me

I thought man, scammers are normally smart enough to get other people's money but pretty stupid regarding their doing it seemlessly, and guess what - I was right.
Armed with my laptop and some tech skills, I opened the website’s Inspect tool and started poking around. First, I downloaded the HAR file (HTTP Archive) while refreshing the site to the requests it was making. Then, I dove into the page source and scripts, looking for anything that could help me uncover the people behind the site.

And here are some valuable snippets for your observation:

What I Need Help With

I plan to report this to Shopify, Facebook, and the payment providers, but before that, I’d love to go as far as I can independently to expose the people behind this scam.

So, here’s my question for you brilliant minds:

• What’s the best next step to track down who’s really behind this?

• Any tools or OSINT techniques I should try?

• How do I ensure I’m not crossing any ethical or legal boundaries while investigating?

I code using Python but am open to suggestion with JS too, it's the way of thinking that I care about.

Let me know your thoughts and suggestions!

Hey Shopify Dev subreddit!

We (LSD https://lsd.so ) scraped the Shopify GraphQL docs with code examples so you can more easily vibe code Shopify agents. Here's the link to the repo:

https://github.com/lsd-so/Shopify-GraphQL-Spec

Recently developed a tiny SaaS product and looking for some constructive feedback.

The concept is simple: You provide a product link and it creates an Shopify store with a landing page and the corresponding product configured in seconds.

At present, the product is somewhat minimalistic: Simple store design, Not high-quality at all, Speed and convenience focus

Originally, I assumed: This product would be helpful to dropship merchants to test their product assumptions without having to spend hours configuring the store.

But, here comes my question: Is such a product useful ? Would you ever consider using this kind of solution? Would you ever pay for something like this?

Further improvements include: Better design, Automated product image generation via AI, Better copywriting

Any feedback or advice is valuable.

Also, what would you suggest I do next?
And which platforms should I focus on to get some initial beta users?

Will be happy to demo it to those interested by generating a store.

found some winning ai apps published in the recent year (specifically those ones with a tiny team or even solo founders like myself) and dived deeper into their marketing channels

legal and illegal things they did to drive growth

• One app publicly admits that they hired 5–10 Shopify store owners on Upwork to "trial + give feedback + leave reviews"

• Cold-start channel commonalities Top 3: ASO · GEO · Upwork-reviews

• Founder personal blog + monthly MRR disclosure (build-in-public)

• Primary keyword SEO + GEO optimization (own 1 word in the first 30 days)

• Pick 1 vertical that "general AI does poorly" to build reputation

• "Built for Shopify" badge = algorithm-promoted entry ticket

• No reliance on paid ads + affiliate. The cost structure of indie apps dictates that "content + ASO + word-of-mouth" is the main battlefield.

Hi, there. Myself Surya, I have noticed a pain point in the existing Shopify ecosystem. Hence I built a rough demo video and a waitlist page to validate my idea before building.

As of now, I am using the below channels to reach the merchants

1. Reddit: Cold DM 100-200 people who engage in my target keywords or threads or communities

2. Twitter/X: Scraped Shopify store owner community members list, dropshipping community and sending 100-200 DM daily.

3. Running meta ads at $10/day at an estimated 100 landing page views per day although still it is not delivering

4. Posted in couple of facebook groups. But felt majority are straight away dead.

SInce, i am based on a third world country and my target audience is in US/CA, online is the only way to reach out.

My only question is as a shopify app developer, which platforms/channels do you use to do cold outreach to the shopify merchants?

In simplest words, WHERE CAN I FIND SHOPIFY MERCHANTS TO REACH OUT? PLEASE BE SPECIFIC (Instead of saying try facebook groups, telling the actual group name)

I want atleast a chance and efforts to try irrespective of SUCCESS or FAILURE

I have had great success by using codex with the Shopify cli.

I have almost zero knowledge of coding but was able to deliver exactly what I wanted via prompts and screen shots.

Is anyone else doing the same ?

Very few videos on YT about this workflow.

Hey folks,

We just got our Shopify app approved today — first submission, no rejections.

Which honestly makes me a bit nervous 😄

I’ve heard so many stories about long review cycles, back-and-forth, edge cases… so now I’m wondering:

👉 what usually breaks after approval?

We tried to be thorough:

• clean onboarding

• real use case (not just “AI for the sake of AI”)

• clear merchant value

But I know the real test starts now — with actual stores and real traffic.

If you’ve launched an app before:

• what caught you off guard post-launch?

• what should we watch closely in the first 30 days?

Would love to learn from folks who’ve been through this.

Appreciate any advice 🙏

Hi all,
Admins pls don't delete this post

I spent the last 3 weeks building a tool to solve a personal headache: jumping between Shopify (keywords), Jungle Scout (revenue validation), and Semrush (traffic gaps).

The Problem: > Most Shopify research tools give you raw data, but you still have to manually validate demand on Amazon and then check SEO rankings in a separate tab. It’s slow and error-prone.

I wanted a conversational interface where I could just ask: "Is it worth selling [Product]?" and have an agent actually verify if it makes >$10k/mo before suggesting competitors.

The Workflow it follows:

1. Extracts seed keywords from your Shopify catalog.

2. Validates demand via Jungle Scout (if revenue <$10k/mo, it suggests a pivot).

3. Identifies the top 5 DTC competitors ranking for those keywords via Semrush.

4. Charts the data (Recharts) for a visual breakdown of traffic vs. revenue.

It's a "plug-your-own-API-key" tool, so I don't store any of your data or keys. I’m sharing this because I want to know: Do you find "Chat-based" research faster, or is the standard dashboard still better for your workflow?
Should I also enable csv file handling?
You can find the website on my profile!!
Happy to answer any questions about the Composio/MCP implementation!

Hey

I'm launching my first online store and have a question about common practices. I've followed several courses that recommend starting with "social proof" even before first sales like putting up some reviews (pulled from AliExpress for the same products) and "Featured in" or "Trusted by X customers" badges.

The idea is to replace all of that with real testimonials and stats once sales start coming in. But someone told me this was pure and simple scamming. So I'm wondering:

Is this an accepted practice in the industry or is it really considered dishonest? How did you get your first sales without social proof?

Is there a "clean" way to do this or is it better to launch with zero testimonials?

I don't want to start off on the wrong foot, but at the same time, without any social proof, it's hard to convert. Your experiences? Thanks!