While I can appreciate that you’re impressed with how many reviews our email campaign yeilded, none of them are fake. Shogun does not have one single fake review. I’m proud to say that each one was hard earned.
If you’re looking for insight on how Apps legitimately get a high review rating:
(1) After each positive customer service response, follow up with a genuine request for a review. As our reviews indicate, we focus on support.
(2) If a negative review is posted, immediately reach out to the store and ask what you can do to fix the issue. Let them know what kind of an impact ratings have on an app.
(3) Run multi-touch/two touch email campaigns to your active users who have not left reviews to please leave a review with their thoughts on the tool.
About a month ago was our first try on #3, and it worked super well, we got about 50 reviews out of it. Keep in mind that is less than a 10% response rate from our over 500+ active user base.
Now that we’ve seen the impact that fast review surges have on pulling the app up the rankings, we will probably save up and run that same campaign every couple months.
If you read our reviews, they are thoughtful and clearly genuine; we have very few one sentence “great app!” reviews. If you see reviews with inactive stores or dead stores, and feel like that indicates fraudulent reviews, it’s probably a good idea to check the churn stats on Shopify users (it’s high, as a lot of new users are “aspirational”).
If you have more feedback on our app, you’re welcome to send an email directly to me and Finbarr at support@getshogun.com. We always appreciate feedback, even when it’s critical
I completely agree with your comments as we know how hard it is to get reviews. Not a single user posts review on his own. We email them and request for review and then they post review. We email every user, out of all users, only 5% users actually posta review. Our app has 1600 users so far and you can see that we only have 108 reviews.
Our developer dedicatedly email all users after setting up app on their store, and then its upto the user if he want to posta review or not.
It’s curious, if not suspicious, seeing app developers not worried about fake reviews, saying that it’s not a big deal. They should be the most concerned about the problem if they only get legitimate reviews.
I never said that fake reviews weren’t a big deal, I simply defended my company against your false statement. I’m sorry if it comes off as harsh, but in my opinion, you should be more considerate before you post something like that.
That said, I will provide some insight as to why I’m not freaking out over the possibility that another app could be using fake reviews:
If someone is faking their reviews to try to game Shopify’s partner program, they’ll be in for a rude awakening when they find out how strict they are about their policies. An app doing that would likely be removed immediately without warning.
Bedsides the aforementioned, I’m not concerned because if an app partner is resorting to paying for fake reviews, they either have a poor product experience or no business/marketing skills, or both. Reviews are only going to get you so far, and Shopify’s app store ranking algorithm is multifaceted.
If you have serious concerns about an app, I recommend emailing the Shopify apps team direct at apps@shopify.com.
I’ve sent reports of fake reviews to shopify support only being told that they were, in fact, real reviews. Sure, they were left by “real” Shopify users/stores but at the end of the day, they were FAKE!
As an app developer, I know how hard it is to get new reviews and how easy it is to lose them.
If an app chooses to spend their money on fake reviews they will not be in Shopify long enough to rip the rewards. When stores use the app they will find its true nature and warn everyone else.
So even if fake reviews were possible they seem like a horrible idea to me.
You can check out our reviews if you want, they were very hard to get and each of them represents hours of hard work. I’m very proud of them.
If an app chooses to spend their money on fake reviews they will not be in Shopify long enough to rip the rewards. When stores use the app they will find its true nature and warn everyone else.
I have found almost 0 fully working App’s in the past two months all are too limited or simply not doing the job or only doing it half the way. Some selling so simple apps that you can find a guide and install it yourself in 5 minutes and then they charge a ffortune for nothing.
One thing I find truly frustrating is seeing a competing app with a ton of all 5 star reviews that are painfully obviously fake. I mean, they’re literally all written on the same day and in the extreme cases, the reviews are quite literally text copied and pasted from the previous review. It’s kind of funny actually. It almost looks like they’re written by the same person but from a different shop.
My only saving grace is that my legitimate users are pretty smart people and I think most people would be able to look at something like that and say “Yeah, those are clearly fake…” and move on but it still annoys me. I don’t think Shopify has a means to penalize those like Google does but hey, I can dream
Does Shopify actually have a policy against this or do they not really track it?
Yes, there are lots of extremely simple apps out there that cater mostly to green Shopify merchants, but the app market is lightyears ahead of where it was just a few years ago and there are many incredible, powerful, and effective apps out there.
Our company just invested over 1,500 developer hours into an UPDATE of our Customer Fields app, which was already a 4.9 rated app. It takes a lot more time to maintain a good app than to roll a new one out.
I’d be interested to hear what you define as “only doing it half way.”
I myself was wondering (and I remember seeing a few questions from others) about whether or not Shopify has a policy that deals with fake app reviews, and they certainly do: Prohibited Actions Policy
The first line under App Reviews specifically says “Leaving fake reviews on your own app, or on a competitor’s app to create a competitive advantage.”
So the question then becomes, how is it monitored/enforced? Anonymous tips?
