r/ShopifyAppDev

Hi everyone, I’m seeing something unusual and trying to break my head on this from past few hours 😞

A merchant upgraded to a paid subscription plan, but the subscription appears to be in Test mode on partner dashboard. Our appSubscriptionCreate mutation explicitly passes test: false, and even now when I test with other live stores, I don’t see the Test charge banner. Never had this issue before.

How could a merchant end up with a subscription charge in Test mode? Any insights would be really helpful.

--

Edit: Solved. It was a Shopify Staff store. It had a realistic name and billing plan name was Shopify Plus.

Today, I saw one very strange issue and feels something fishy or some major bug in Shopify Ads.

I am running ads with bid amount very low, so that I was getting 5-6 clicks in a day. However, all of a sudden the clicks spiked yesterday and today. Yesterday, on just one category specific ad, I got 26 clicks where were also in the last leg i.e. between 22:00 - 23:99UTC. And today where day is not completed yet, I already got 12 clicks within single category and no installs at all, whereas I've almost 25% conversion.

Problematic thing is Google Analytics data was matching exactly till date and for these clicks no data is shown in Google Analytics. In Google Analytics, it just shows 2 page views for today that too direct visits not the referral.

Is anybody else facing the issue? I am lucky that I had click bid set to very low, else Shopify would have made me bankrupt. Also, my category ad budget is set to $10, so how come yesterday it had spent 4 times.

I built an AI-powered SMS app for Shopify stores focused on abandoned cart recovery.

The idea is pretty simple: when someone abandons checkout, the AI immediately starts a two-way text conversation while purchase intent is still high. It can answer product questions, handle objections, recommend products, ask why they left, offer support, etc. Basically trying to replicate a retail sales associate over SMS instead of sending another generic “you left something behind” message.

From a dev standpoint, building it was honestly the easy part.

The hard part has been distribution and getting merchants to actually test it.

I’ve been doing direct outreach to Shopify stores and even building personalized demos trained on their actual store/products before contacting them. I thought that would massively increase engagement, but response rates have basically been zero. Most don’t even click the demo link.

I’m starting to realize this might be more of a trust/distraction problem than a product problem. Store owners are bombarded with apps/tools constantly.

For those of you who have built Shopify apps or SaaS products in the ecosystem:

• What actually got you your first real users?
• Did cold outreach work at all?
• Was the Shopify App Store your main acquisition channel?
• Did partnerships/agencies/content work better?
• Any lessons learned getting merchants to trust a new app?

At this point I’d happily let stores use it for free just to get real-world feedback and usage data. I am positing it as a Beta where I will customize, implement, and recover 250 carts for free.

I feel dejected because I am excited about it, I know it works, but I cannot seem to get to store owners to use it! I'm just frustrated.

Hi everyone,

I'm an individual developer with experience in [React/Node.js/Python/golang/mysql/clickhouse/kafka/etc.]. I'm thinking about developing Shopify apps, but I'm not sure which areas still have commercial potential.

Specifically, I'm curious about:

Common pain points merchants face that aren’t well served by existing apps.

Niches or features that are currently underserved.

Any lessons or tips from solo developers who’ve launched apps successfully.

Any advice, insights, or resources would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

i just saw an interview of the founder of Kaching (not affiliated with them) outlining the blueprint to making $4.5m per year with his shopify apps.

what stood out is that his apps are getting 5 star reviews, over 4000+ now. which is insaane.

here are the key takeaways from the vid that i think all shopify app devs should get inspiration from:

5 star reviews are CRUCIAL to any shopify app.

1. Product - obvious #1 priority. optimize this to the core. make it very easy to use, and make sure the important features WORK.
2. Monthly emails - this is a simple win. show how much revenue or how many hours YOUR app saved them, and add a review link at the bottom. something easy to quantify.
3. Feature voting and bug board directly on the Shopify dashboard. they used Features.Vote to automatically capture customer feature requests and vote on what they need. do their request in less than 1 day and 90% of the time they're happy to leave you a review.
4. Technical customer support - customer support SHOULD know how to dig into the code and fix things. makes it waay easier and faster to resolve customer enquiries, and then DONT FORGET: ask for a review.
5. 24/7 customer support (yup 24/7). get 1 VA that does the night shift.
6. Gamify reviews - leaderboard to show whoever gets the most reviews, with a raffle and bonus.
   1. They had this concept of "Persuader" of the month - calculate the conversion rate of how many times you ask for a review vs how many reviews you get. it helps bring more reviews and incentivizes the team to get bonuses for each one.

what other tactics are you using to get 5 star reviews?

Hello and thanks for taking the question. I am ready to launch a shopify app for my web application (marketing oriented) that mainly lives off Shopify.

The web app is large scale with tons of features. All of the advice I have seen is in order to get approved is that i should start with the bare bones for the Shopify App and then build it out.

So my worry is, since my competitors have a ton of features built into their shopify app, if i launch mine with just the basics am I going to hinder the launch? Even if I add features out in the week or so to follow my approval?

Would it better to build it all out and maybe struggle getting approved?

Any advice welcome.

https://preview.redd.it/womi5s5ynw1h1.png?width=1304&format=png&auto=webp&s=c8ecd1bb286668c386f386aa0e85f81eb3bfdc30

building out pricing for a new app and stuck on whether to go free trial or offer a permanent free plan. from what I've seen, trials push users toward a decision faster but a lot of people just cancel before getting charged anyway. free plans seem to get more installs and reviews early on which matters for ranking, but then, you're stuck with a bunch of users who never upgrade because the free tier does enough for them. has anyone actually tested both and seen a clear difference? curious whether the install volume from a free plan is worth the lower monetization rate, or, if a 7-day trial with full access is the better move when you're just starting out.

Hey everyone, I launched my first Shopify app 3 weeks ago. So far, I’ve had 61 installs and 7 paid subscribers.

I’m happy with the early traction, but I don't have anything to compare this to. Is this a good start for the first month?

I would love to hear from other app devs what their early-stage conversion rates looked like. Thanks!

I’m working on a SaaS where every action has a fixed cost on my side, so flat monthly pricing doesn’t really make sense because usage varies too much between merchants.

Postpaid usage billing also feels risky UX-wise since customers can end up with surprise invoices at the end of the month even with caps in place.

Right now I’m leaning more toward a prepaid credit system where users buy credits upfront and actions simply consume from that balance.

Curious how people here implemented this technically. Did you build your own credit ledger/wallet system, use Stripe balances, or rely on a billing platform for it?

I’ve been building a lightweight Shopify app called Intent Flow, and I’m trying to validate whether this is actually useful for merchants or just 'another analytics tool'

The idea came from something I noticed repeatedly:

Most Shopify analytics apps tell you:

• what happened yesterday
• traffic numbers
• dashboards/charts

But as a store owner, what I REALLY wanted to know was:

"Which visitor is actually likely to buy right now?"

So Intent Flow focuses only on that.

Current features:

• Live visitor sessions
• Intent scoring based on behavior
• Scroll depth tracking
• Add-to-cart tracking
• Funnel insights
• Checkout tracking
• High-intent visitor identification

Example:
If someone:

• revisits the same product multiple times
• scrolls deeply
• spends more time
• adds to cart

The app increases their intent score automatically.

The goal is:
NOT more dashboards.

The goal is:
- helping merchants identify serious buyers before they leave.

What I’m intentionally trying to avoid:

• heavy bloated analytics
• complicated setup
• enterprise-style dashboards
• 100 useless charts

I want this to feel:

• lightweight
• real-time
• simple
• actionable

As a merchant, would something like this actually help you increase revenue?

For example:

• identifying high-intent traffic
• seeing where users drop
• understanding which products create buying intent
• spotting checkout leakage early

Also curious:
what would feel like fair pricing for this?

Would love brutally honest feedback:

• useful?
• pointless?
• already solved elsewhere?
• what feature would make this a "must pay for" app?

Building a SaaS product with a Shopify integration and trying to understand how billing is handled for App Store apps.

The Shopify app itself is free and acts mainly as an integration layer. The core SaaS product is paid and already has existing billing outside Shopify.

Question is:

If merchants discover/install through the Shopify App Store, is Shopify okay with:

• using Shopify Billing API only for Shopify-acquired users
• while continuing to bill direct website customers externally (Stripe, etc.)?

Or does Shopify expect all users of the platform to eventually move under Shopify billing once the app is listed publicly?

Hi, I’m looking for a Shopify developer who can take over a partially completed store and finish the remaining design + setup work. This is not a full rebuild — just fixing and completing what’s already there.

I need someone comfortable with:
• theme/layout fixes
• homepage cleanup
• header adjustments
• button/link fixes
• basic SEO setup
• cart/sign‑in page styling
• general Shopify troubleshooting

I prefer a flat rate (not hourly) since I’m on a tight budget and want predictable costs.

If you’re available, I can send the store link and the full list of items that need to be completed.
Looking to start right away.

Hey,

Has anyone hired an agency or freelancer to help with app store listing and branding? How was your experience? I am a first time app developer and a little lost. Appreciate any recommendation!

Thanks!

First Shopify app shipped last week. Approved on the App Store, listing is live. 3 installs since approval, 0 reviews, 1 confirmed uninstall within an hour. Solo dev, working from Poland.

The app scans a merchant's catalog and scores each product 0 to 100 on signals that show up in AI shopping results: ChatGPT Shopping, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews. The honest framing is that 11 of the 14 rules I check are classic SEO (title length, alt text, description depth) and only 3 are actually unique to AI surfaces (GTIN/barcode, Shopify standard category metadata, structured metafields). I am not pretending the 11 are AI-specific. The score is a combined snapshot, and I am still tuning the weights.

Stack is Remix template, Polaris, Prisma over SQLite, Docker Compose on a single Hetzner VPS. GPT-4.1-nano for the AI rewrites, one bundled call returning title plus description plus SEO copy as JSON. Embedded admin via App Bridge v3.

Three things I learned the hard way this week:

1. authenticate.webhook() from u/shopify/shopify-app-remix with expiringOfflineAccessTokens: true tries to refresh the offline token AFTER validating HMAC. For shop/redact webhooks (which fire 48h after uninstall) the token is already revoked. The library throws Response(500) on the failed refresh, and Shopify retries 9 times over 48h. My partner panel was full of red. Fix was to bypass authenticate.webhook in compliance routes and verify HMAC manually with crypto.timingSafeEqual against SHOPIFY_API_SECRET.

2. Concurrent AI fix requests can race past the monthly limit if the counter check and increment are not atomic. SQLite handles this fine if you wrap in prisma.$transaction(async tx => ...) because it uses BEGIN IMMEDIATE under the hood and serializes writers.

3. The default catalog scan loops productsConnection.first(50) until hasNextPage is false, with zero cost awareness. Standard plan has a 2000 point bucket. A 250 product scan can burn 1000 points easily. Two concurrent scans hit THROTTLED. The fix is reading extensions.cost.throttleStatus.currentlyAvailable after each call and sleeping if low. The floor needs to scale with maximumAvailable or Plus stores end up sleeping at 97 percent full.

Things I am still unsure about:

Pricing. Free tier is 20 AI fixes per month right now (was 100 until yesterday, that was too generous, the one real merchant uninstalled in an hour without burning one). Paid is 9 and 29. I am wondering if this should be unlimited with a catalog size cap instead. Merchants think in catalogs, not in fixes.

Whether app/uninstalled belongs in [webhooks.subscriptions] of shopify.app.toml or registered programmatically. Template defaults are ambiguous and merchant sessions linger in my DB after uninstall.

How others handle the 30 day GDPR clock for compliance webhooks. I ACK 200 even when internal cleanup throws, to avoid retry storms, but there is no alert path if cleanup silently fails repeatedly.

What did I miss? What is the obvious thing I will regret in 3 months?