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).
Hey everyone! 👋
I'm getting ready to launch my very first Shopify app after spending months building and testing it.
Before I hit the Publish button, I'd love to learn from developers who have already been through the process.
If you could go back and give yourself advice before launching your first app, what would it be?
Some things I'm currently thinking about:
For context, my app is in the discounts/promotions category, and my goal is to build something that merchants genuinely find useful rather than chasing downloads.
I'd really appreciate any lessons, mistakes, success stories, or resources you'd recommend.
Thanks in advance—I hope to avoid a few beginner mistakes with your advice! 🙏
Small win, but it genuinely made my week.
I've been building a Shopify SEO app (MetaGenius: AI SEO & Alt Text — helps merchants auto-generate meta titles, descriptions, alt text, etc.) and growth has been painfully slow. No ads, no influencer deals, just the app sitting on the App Store.
This past week: 5 new installs, all organic. And one of them converted to a paid Pro plan.
I know that sounds tiny. But I've been grinding on this thing solo, and seeing strangers find it, install it, and actually pay for it without me doing anything to push them there... that feeling hits different.
No Shopify ads. No paid promotions. Pure organic.
If you're building a Shopify app and feeling like nothing is happening — keep going. The App Store does eventually work. SEO on your own listing matters. Reviews matter. The compounding is just slow at first.
To anyone who's further along: what was the moment growth started feeling real for you?
I run a store and have been wondering whether people are starting to treat AI discovery as an actual channel or if it is still too early? Prior to AI, strategy was pretty clear for me. Focusing on SEO, paid ads, marketplaces, and emails. But now it feels like more buyers are using chatgpt or other AI to look for buying recommendations.
Are people adjusting to this change or is this still one of those trends that will fade? Would be interested to hear if anyone has seen actual traffic, conversions or product mentions coming from AI tools and what strategies you apply.
Trying to figure out what's actually worth adding early on vs what can wait. There are so many apps it's overwhelming. What did you start with? Thank you in advance.
Hey everyone,
We launched a Shopify app called Ultimate Product Options last year and have been improving it step by step based on merchant feedback and real store use cases.
The goal was to make product customization easier without making Shopify variants and product setup overly complicated.
Currently the app supports:
• text fields, dropdowns, checkboxes, swatches, buttons, uploads, etc
• add-on pricing for custom options
• conditional logic
• product personalization
• reusable option sets
• bulk assignment across products
• live preview style customization flows
A big reason we built this was seeing how difficult native Shopify variants become once stores start offering personalized or configurable products, especially for print, gifting, bundles, and custom items.
We’d genuinely appreciate any honest feedback from merchants or developers here — whether it’s around missing features, UX, performance, onboarding, or anything that could make the experience better for stores.
Hey everyone,
Like many of you in the Shopify App Partner community, I’ve been figuring out a migration plan since the news dropped that Mantle is winding down. Losing our centralized app infrastructure right before the Q4 rush is a massive headache.
I'm a solo software engineer building apps in the ecosystem (like Revnous), and I’ve spent the last few months developing Appdesh to solve my own multi-app fragmentation. Because of the current vacuum in the market, I am opening up our private beta cohort early.
Crucially, Appdesh is entirely built and hosted on German soil and engineered for strict, zero-compromise GDPR compliance. For those of us operating in or selling to the European market, this eliminates the constant anxiety surrounding data residency, Schrems II, and complex DPAs. Your merchant and transaction data stays insulated in the highest-security legal jurisdiction.
Here is what is fully operational in the dashboard right now:
Acquisition Funnels & Referrers: Deep visibility into where your listing views, clicks, installs, and premium subscriptions are originating (tracking everything from Google and Reddit to ChatGPT).
Subscriptions & Financial Transactions: Real-time metrics for MRR, trial conversions, billing cycles, and upgrades without dashboard lag.
Customer Command / Developer CRM: A clean repository of your active merchants, installation histories, and lifetime value (LTV).
3rd-Party Integrations: Connect your app events seamlessly to the rest of your tech stack.
The Early Partner Beta:
I want to work directly with a small group of active app founders to ensure total feature parity with the workflows you are about to lose.
To make the transition completely frictionless, I am awarding all early beta partners their first 3 months 100% free. If you are looking for a secure, high-performance, and fully GDPR-compliant new home for your app portfolio’s operations, drop a comment below or send me a DM. Let's get you set up.
Cheers,
Irfan
I was wondering what's the process you go through when you select you store's apps? Do you test drive a bunch and then choose?
I am wondering if there are devs here that developed Shopify apps and if someone can share some tips/tricks to get better traction. Of course it depends in which category or niche one operates but I'm generally wondering what works/worked.. Is there such a thing as the App store "seo" or optimisation that can be done? Any tips regarding asking for reviews? Are you putting lots of effort in your website to then try and convert them in Shopify?
Looking forward to any ideas or tips/tricks..
Hi,
Our app GetSpin360 got approved and we are starting to market it. Currently it is running ads on Shopify but was wondering which platform will give the best ROI. Budget is $500 / month. Should i continue with Shopify ads or switch to FB, IG, TikTok or something.
Thanks
I released my first app a couple of months ago and in the last 3 weeks I ran ads in Shopify app store so wanted to share some findings and get feedback:
week 1- I started with "search" campaign, defined a few keywords (6-7) relevant to PromoOS, set bid per keyword (if I remember correctly I set it be mid-range). For the first few days literally nothing happened. no views no clicks.
week 2- after posting here I did 3 things. First I increased the budget per word, that really affected the views and clicks. Second, I added more keywords because one of the tips I got was to cover more keywords- not sure it really influenced the results. Lastly, I created additional campaign- Homepage, to show the app to anyone who's visiting the app store and not just with search. That also helped, I set a bid of around 20$ to start with and then played with it. That really increased visibility and clicks.
week 3- I stopped the Homepage campaign :) Yes I know that it brought traffic, but I wanted to see what happens when I increase the budget on the keywords campaign so had to shut it down.
Summary for now- so far I only got 1 install of the app. I'm not sure if it's through one of the campaigns (they don't show it). Not sure yet if it's normal or not, but I'm going to continue running the ads for now until I have better sense of how to fine tune them.
Anyone has any feedback on this process or tips how to improve it?
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?
I recently built my first Shopify app. Not linking or naming it to avoid this being a promo post. It was just approved a few days ago, and now I'm trying to identify merchants who would potentially find it useful.
The app allows merchants to automate revenue splitting amongst collaborators. They invite collaborators by email and define per-product, per-collaborator rules for splitting revenue. The app then does everything else in the background: tracks orders and refunds and assigns amounts owed to collaborators; pays out collaborators on a merchant-defined cadence using Stripe; shows the merchant exactly what each collaborator is owed and how much they've been paid to date.
It's a nifty little app that was right in my wheelhouse. I'm a software engineer with years of experience in payments and financial engineering. But, as other engineers turned Shopify devs on this sub have said, the marketing is the part that I'm finding difficult.
My sense is that the target merchant for this app is a small-to-medium sized store (ie, not a vendor marketplace) that has a few to dozens of collaborators. The question is, how do I find those stores? Most Reddit subs are pretty strict about self-promotion or finding beta testers. What mechanisms have you used to identify your target merchant market?