A. Kayali

@malisauskasLT @thomas_nrr Laughing my fucking ass out

@thomas_nrr You're definitely out.

Recently, it’s become very clear that our community is being threatened by bad actors who are violating multiple Shopify policies without being punished. Shopify likely doesn’t have a system in place (or it isn’t working as it should yet) and shady apps exploit that. Time to do something about it. Here's my idea: - I invite credible app developers to join a private Discord server (strictly invite-only, only verified identities, 100% trusted). - We share evidence about bad actors in our categories, server is well structured and easy to navigate, all violations are timestamped, tracked and updated. Sooner or later, Shopify will act (I honestly believe they care about this) and then we will share all of the well documented evidence with them. Who’s in?

@AdvaitVaidya2 @malisauskasLT Please do and post about it!

@malisauskasLT I’m creating a chrome extension next to detect these cases. Will also create a list of apps doing this

This Shopify app was clearly buying fake 5-star reviews and then didn't pay someone, so they got spammed with 1-star reviews instead which tanked their rating to 2.9 🤣 I have no idea how it passed through Shopify review approval system and got published. Anyone else feeling the new review purge coming? 🤣

@malisauskasLT @yeramianm This is just tragic. This will only motivate other partners to do the same and worse. Seems like the Shopify partners policy is just to be there with no enforcement.

@yeramianm Not really 😅 All of their apps are back and still ✨Built for Shopify ✨

Ok maybe we're finally starting to get somewhere with this?

@hunkybill @soulchildpls @ShopifyDevs @liam_at_shopify @atleeclark @Shopify Of course reviews matter and have big impact on rankings, its one of the main factors triggering the algorithm. This is exactly why its stated in the Shopify Partners Policy to not gain them in a manipulative way.

@soulchildpls @addylle @ShopifyDevs @liam_at_shopify @atleeclark @Shopify Why would it be a crime to exchange a review for free App use? I mean, in the big scheme of things, that really does not affect anything, unless of course you expect reviews to mean anything. But do they? Is there any evidence they truly do anything? Seems kinda hard to say.

This is absolute cinema.. I created a non dev Shopify store to check this app because it looked suspicious and this explains the extreme review growth. I hope action is taken immediately with this partner apps.shopify.com/partners/futur… @ShopifyDevs @liam_at_shopify @atleeclark @Shopify

@matthewsmith Im surprised Shopify doesn't have internal alerts for such review anomalies, if they had it would have been much easier to catch. These guys dominated almost all categories they were in for half a year.

The fix here isn't complicated. Look at apps getting a high velocity of reviews and look into it.

@ohad @matthewsmith @ShopifyDevs @liam_at_shopify @atleeclark @Shopify I really hope everyone thinking that they are "outsmarting" other partners by going against Partners Policy is aware that he is risking his recurring revenue and a 3.5x ARR cash if they exit. Sooner or later they will get caught.

@addylle @matthewsmith @ShopifyDevs @liam_at_shopify @atleeclark @Shopify Looks like they got zero apps rn

@pa1ge Unless Shopify creates a "library" with apps generated with Sidekick to install on their stores, then it's going to get harder for app devs to succeed.

Shopify Sidekick can generate apps now, is that a real threat to app devs? Yes, however... Most merchants using 3rd-party apps don’t know how to leverage AI or prompt well. Nor would they know what functionality to ask for unless they've used a similar app. There’s a massive knowledge gap. Until it closes, there’s opportunity.

@TalktoHenryJ Looks interesting, dm.

What would you pay for this Shopify app?

@malisauskasLT The exact same thing happened to us last year, also in the start of Q4. They have to figure out some sort of compensation, it's just unfair...

Update: we lost all our badges on Oct 12th because of a Subscriptions app vulnerability issue that surfaced on Oct 7th (which we fixed in less than 4 hours during night time after getting notified). Apparently, if your one app is exposed, you lose all of your apps' BFS status (with a week's delay for some reason). How does it make sense? We're punished on a partner level, not app level, and the governance team says we can only get BFS back from Dec 12th. Which would result in ruined Q4, the most sensitive time of the year in ecom. If this is not resolved with a common sense, we will be forced to open new business entities for each app and separate partner accounts in order to avoid such situation in the future. 🥲 It sounds crazy, requires a lot of resources and would create huge complexity overall but we can't have such risk of losing all BFS badges only because of an issue on a single app. 🤷🏻‍♂️ It seems like governance team is acting according to a strict rulebook (which makes sense) but that rulebook doesn't cover such cases and it results in extreme unfairness. I really hope Shopify will be helpful in this case. Partners who have multiple apps should be aware of this.

@DsMatie How would you advice this guy to start monetizing? Start from the free users introducing plans to them or only for new users onward.

A Shopify app making $1000 MRR with 150 users is better than a Shopify app making $0 MRR with 10,000 users. Listen, it's better to lose 95% of your user' base and have a paying plan, rather than to wait and be exhausted by the situation.

@IliasHaddad3 Is it approved, link/name?

Approved for beta testing

The Unofficial Shopify partner manager has been sent for review, and it should be available for testing after getting approved

@JeremiahPrummer @Shopify Lovely graph isn't it.

@JeremiahPrummer @Shopify I fully agree with you, we have merchants doing 6 figures monthly and did not mind the "powered by" thing, even paid customers had it and nobody complained. It impacted our growth as well tremendously.

Hey @Shopify, can we chat about this? I’m afraid a recent policy change is going to cost merchants, and I want to explain why. We were informed this week that we will be delisted from the Shopify App Store unless we remove this tiny “powered by” message that appears when someone completes a survey. On some level I understand what you’re trying to do here, but this is common practice in almost every software category. This is because seeing software in action is the BEST way to get a feel for how it works. A “powered by” message shown in context is maybe the greatest organic growth lever available to a software company. I mean even Shopify does this… So here’s where it gets tough for the merchant. The short version is this “powered by” message pays for our Free tier, which over 2.5k merchants rely on. These messages are driving growth, and in many cases allowing apps in the ecosystem to charge less because usage = growth. Take away this growth lever, and apps either have to charge more, or pay for acquisition. IMO this should be up to the merchant. In our case, they can remove this if they are paying for our service, or can just choose not to use our service. A VERY conservative estimate puts our cost to support our free version at $75k/year, and that’s just support and data costs. It doesn’t include developer time, extra strain on our systems, etc. Removing our “powered by” makes it very hard to justify offering a free version. I totally understand the logic on your side, but I do think this is going to have a detrimental impact on the ecosystem. We are cutting off a great organic growth lever, forcing apps to fund growth with subscription revenue charged to merchants. I believe strongly this is a net negative and would love for this to be reconsidered. At the very least please give us a few months to figure out how to adjust our business models. 😅 cc @harleyf, @tobi, @ShopifyDevs

@DsMatie @celispj Back when the 20% share was cut, the app store did not have ads. I am not sure but I believe now they generate more money from ads than what the 20% brought them. Keep in mind back then there were 4-6k apps, now it's triple. Or maybe I am wrong and we are going to pay as well. 🤷🏻‍♂️

@celispj Based on this assumption you think they won't put it back for apps as well?

Wow, Shopify has announced it will now take 15% of the revenue from Shopify Themes.

@Conv_monarch Quality > quantity, put some thought process in one app, speak to merchants to see if there is really a need for such thing and then build. Unless you have loads of free time to waste keep on with the 100 apps. 😅

@Conv_monarch Respect the hustle but that's not the way. I advise you to hit pause for a sec and rethink the strategies of getting your hands on the M5 😅

@hsivar20 I dont know why everyone is mentioning Clarity, Clarity does not have session recording only single app pages and you lose the journey of the user. We use Session rewind and it tracks the full session.

Any session recording softwares that plays well with embedded Shopify apps?

@alexanderhupfer Then u havent found the right co-founder. What we do is if we have two opinions on a topic we run A/B tests and see which performs best, the winning opinion stays. The power in having a partner is you have 2x power :)

Unpopular opinion: Having a cofounder means additional loops on every decision and alignment for giving up half your equity.

@oykusorgun_ apps.shopify.com/addly Thanks!

Let's do another round of tips for #Shopify App Listing! Share your Shopify listing and I'll offer tips to improve it. #shopifyapp #shopifydev