Matthew Smith

👀 Hey, hey, 10K! - a milestone day for Section Star. Sorry, ya'll. I have no secret formula to share. I just built a thing and kept making it better. Thanks Shopify for making a great place to build. apps.shopify.com/sections-ai

With Shopify reviews being a hot topic right now, I've got some good news! Checkout Plus just passed 100 reviews at a 5 star rating! And I can confidently say that everyone of these reviews are genuine and hard earned! While some do come from shameless support conversations, I can still say I am proud to have hit this milestone!

@hohomelodic @Shopify @ShopifyDevs Amazing that within a minute they got the app installed, setup bundles, and made enough sales to see an increase in AOV.

App so good people feel the need to review it within minutes of use.... @Shopify @ShopifyDevs

@patrickbo11e @ShopifyDevs I don't understand why apps don't have to have names anymore.

@ShopifyDevs this is just funny to me

The past few weeks I've submitted more Shopify Partner violations than I have in my last 10 years in the ecosystem. The floodgates have opened. @ShopifyDevs

@iamsomewalrus I started to slow down and review each diff as AI performs the changes. Allows for an understanding of the code base while still going relatively fast.

Sweet spot for being AI pilled are managers who are strong technically and hopping back on the IC path. It’s not brainrot, it’s a level of fuzziness. You’re comfortable knowing your code base at varying levels of fuzziness - “eh it works generally like this” to “here’s the line for that specific edge case”. You’re comfortable parallelizing work and knowing which projects are key and which you can sleep one. (Definitely speaking for myself here)

@iamsomewalrus Just commit it and test in prod

Migrating my Shopify app to the new Shopify billing - trials and tribulations * Test Plan can’t have any usage events, even if they are free (billing!) so you can’t really test with any feel good fidelity that your app is working with respect to entitlements related to usage events. Feels bad! * now your app needs access to the partner API to confirm the subscription - another set of credentials for you to manage in your app! * the subscription stuff on the partner API is on the “unstable” version. Feels bad man!

@iamsomewalrus Any luck?

@matthewsmith you are a scholar and a gentleman. I'll let you know how the night goes.

@matthewsmith do you know if App Billing requires setting the usage plan max per month use like Managed Billing used to? (I asked gpt pro, too, but you know the more sources the merrier) I'm gonna get heads down converting my app tonight to App Billing.

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? 🤣

@ecombeckett Yeah, and even that didn't seem to move the needle that much.

@matthewsmith what changed is that erikas posted about it 😅

Gaming reviews on the Shopify app store is not new. This is a post I made almost a year ago. What happened since then? My app went from #2 in the category to #5. The three apps that past me ... all gamed reviews by offering incentives in exchange for reviews. Receipts are in the reviews.

Ya'll this is not a HARD problem. You can tell why the reviews were left just by reading them.

Maybe I am the only sucker playing by the rules. This is from the Tapita section app that has recently jumped in rankings too. All these apps are using reviews to force Shopify shop owners to contact support to farm reviews.

@jan_shopifyapps @malisauskasLT I guess the lesson here is that reviews are easy to get if you offer something free in exchange.

@malisauskasLT @matthewsmith Frustrating for developers who are genuinely trying to collect reviews - and it’s not exactly easy to collect them in the first place.

Update - all of their apps got delisted right after my post. Less than 48 hours after they're all back on App Store with the banner removed. All of their reviews and Built for Shopify badges are still there though 🤷🏻‍♂️ Just like I said in my initial post, scamming now gets you a huge possible upside, while the only downside is a temporary delisting. From new developer's perspective it just make sense taking such risk. And it's a huge headache for Shopify with no easy solution. Thousands of Shopify merchants are already using these apps on their stores, so Shopify can't just get rid of them because it would impact all these merchants as well. No communication from Shopify yet but I hope they're trying to find a solution for this because it's clearly a pattern everyone sees 😔

@fraxool @malisauskasLT I just checked and they still have BFS too.

@malisauskasLT @matthewsmith At the very least, when there’s clear proof that a developer cheated, Shopify should remove all of their reviews as a punishment. Once cheating is confirmed, there’s no way to know which reviews were genuine and which ones weren’t

@kurtinc @Shopify @promopartypro How so?

We suspect last week's @Shopify Managed Pricing change to Shopify App Pricing broke our billing in @promopartypro. Apps are hard😭

@ohad @addylle @ShopifyDevs @liam_at_shopify @atleeclark @Shopify Unfortunately they are not the only ones. But maybe making an example of them will help

@addylle @matthewsmith @ShopifyDevs @liam_at_shopify @atleeclark @Shopify I think they've already been caught due to the backlash.

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

It is not a usage cap. With volume pricing all units are billed at the lowest tier rate reached. So if the customer bought 10,000 things they would all be priced at $3 / each in the screenshot you have. In the forum post we mention that usage caps are not yet supported: community.shopify.dev/t/shopify-app-…

@eytanseidman Thanks! Love this addition. Caps would be awesome but this is a huge W.

Ok, dumb question. With this app pricing scenario, does the 3,000+ things act as a cap? So, you will get billed for 2-2,000 but 3001+ is not billed. Or, if you hit 3,000 you will not get billed at all.