I’ve been thinking about discovery within the Shopify ecosystem.
When I need a Shopify app, there’s the App Store.
When I need an agency, I usually search Google or ask for recommendations.
For freelancers, there are platforms like Upwork.
For interesting Shopify stores and projects, I usually discover them through social media.
But I’m curious how other people actually do this.
Where do you currently go when you want to discover:
- a new Shopify app?
- a Shopify agency?
- a freelancer/developer?
- interesting Shopify stores?
- new tools built for Shopify?
I’m asking because I’ve been experimenting with a project called Bidify that tries to bring some of these things together.
But before building more features, I’d really like to understand how people currently solve this problem.
What works for you today?
Hi @berkbelcioglu
This project idea is quite intriguing. As a developer in the Shopify environment, I typically search for the following:
Regarding Shopify Apps: I primarily use the official Shopify App Store, but I also look for recently released tools on Product Hunt.
For Agencies & Freelancers: I use sites like Upwork, LinkedIn, and direct community networking (like the Shopify Community forums or Twitter/X) to locate projects or developers.
For Interesting Stores & Inspiration: I typically find distinctive Shopify stores via e-commerce newsletters, design shows, or Twitter/X.
A centralized attention and discovery platform such as Bidify might prove to be an intriguing experiment.
Thanks and if you like my answer don’t forget to mark it as solution.
For apps specifically, I think the honest answer is that discovery inside the App Store is broken for anything that is not already big, and that is worth knowing before you build on top of it.
From my daily crawl of the store, 10,870 live apps today: 44.8% of them have zero reviews, 73% have fewer than ten, and the top 1% of apps hold 48.7% of every review in the store. So roughly half the catalogue is effectively undiscoverable through the App Store’s own surfaces. When someone says they find apps on the App Store, what they usually mean is that they find the twenty apps the App Store decided to show them.
Where the other half actually gets found, in rough order of how often I see it: a direct recommendation in a thread like this one, a Google search that lands on a comparison or roundup page rather than on the App Store itself, and agencies installing their own standard stack across every client.
One thought on Bidify. A bidding leaderboard solves ordering, but the thing that makes app discovery hard is not order, it is that a merchant cannot tell whether a small app is a hidden gem or abandoned. Surfacing “is this still maintained, is it still growing, what did the last three reviews say” would do more for discovery than position does. That is the gap I kept running into myself, which is why I ended up building a free searchable directory of the store at bestappify.com rather than another ranking.
(Disclosure: BestAppify is mine, so I am not neutral here.)
Hi @angelina-new-user ,
Thanks, appreciate the breakdown! That’s actually a good list to react to, because it’s basically 4-5 different tools (App Store, Product Hunt, Upwork, LinkedIn, newsletters) just to cover what I’m trying to fit into one place.
Since posting this I actually went and built a bunch of it out. Anyone can add a listing themselves, no account or approval, so it’s not me manually curating a list. There’s tag-based filtering per category now too (so within agencies you can filter by Development, Branding, Store setup, whatever fits, similar idea for apps and stores), plus a search bar. And the part I think actually matters most: agencies, freelancers, and partners now link to everything they’ve built, and it goes both ways, so you click into an app and see who made it and what else that person or team has shipped. That’s closer to what LinkedIn gives you for people than what the App Store gives you for apps.
Curious whether something like that would’ve actually replaced one of the tools on your list, or if it just becomes another tab to check.
Hi @rezza.rzk ,
Yeah, that’s a completely fair point and honestly a different problem than what I’m solving. Bidding tells you who’s willing to put money behind wanting to be seen right now, it’s an attention signal, not a quality signal. It says nothing about whether the app is actually good or maintained, you’re right that it doesn’t touch that at all.
I think that’s actually why it’s not really competing with something like bestappify.com, you’re solving “is this app trustworthy and maintained,” I’m solving “how do I even find things that aren’t already the top 1% with all the reviews.” Those stats you posted are wild and kind of make my point for me, if 44.8% of apps have zero reviews, review-based discovery structurally can’t help them either, they never get the chance to accumulate any. A bidding leaderboard at least gives a small or new app a real, visible shot at the top spot for a while, regardless of review count.
Curious how bestappify approaches the maintainability side, are you pulling signals like update frequency, changelog activity, support responsiveness? That seems like the harder problem honestly.
Interesting timing for me 
— I have four apps sitting in the review queue right now, so I’ve spent the last month researching exactly this from the developer side.
What I found matches Rezza’s numbers. The App Store search is basically a review flywheel: reviews drive ranking, ranking drives installs, installs drive reviews. Great once you’re in it, invisible before it. Which means as a new developer, I’m not really counting on the App Store to be discovered at all in the first months.
The channels I’m actually planning to lean on, for whatever it’s worth as a data point: answering real questions in places like this forum and Reddit (people install what helped them, not what was advertised), YouTube tutorial creators (a single “how to do X on Shopify” video mentioning a tool seems to outlive any ad), and cross-recommendations between small devs — I’ve noticed indie apps quietly pointing users to each other, which honestly feels like the most trustworthy signal in the whole ecosystem.
One thing I’d add from the merchant conversations I’ve had: nobody says “I browse the App Store for fun”. Discovery starts with a problem — mail in spam, cart abandonment, whatever — and whichever channel answers that problem first wins the install. So any discovery tool that organizes by problem rather than by category would already be doing something the App Store doesn’t. 
Yes, and it is the harder problem — mostly because the honest version of it is smaller than it sounds.
What we can actually observe is the listing, not the build. Shopify doesn’t publish a real “last updated” or version date on the public store page, so nobody outside the app can see when code shipped. What is observable is the listing surface, and that we diff daily. In one recent twelve-day window we logged 871 field-level changes across 541 distinct apps out of 10,870 live ones — so roughly 5% of the catalogue touched its listing in under two weeks. The breakdown is more interesting than the total: 225 apps changed their name, 169 their tagline, 137 their pricing, 100 their description, 82 their icon. Pricing changes are the ones I’d watch if I were a merchant; a name change on an app you already installed is usually a repositioning, and repositioning tends to come before or after something bigger.
But I’d push back on treating that as a maintenance signal on its own. An app can rewrite its tagline every month and ship nothing, and a genuinely well-maintained app can leave its listing untouched for a year. It’s evidence of attention, not of upkeep — the same distinction you’re drawing with bidding, honestly.
On support responsiveness we do measure it — review reply coverage per app — and we also tested whether it means what everyone assumes. Across 891 apps with a complete review history, reply rate had no relationship with rating. Apps that answer every review don’t rate higher than apps that answer none. It’s still worth knowing as a merchant (it tells you whether anyone is home), but it isn’t a quality proxy, and I’d rather say that than sell it as one.
Which is a long way of agreeing with you: these are two different problems. Yours is “how does anything outside the top 1% get seen at all”, and no amount of quality signal solves it, because you need to be found before anyone can evaluate you. Mine only starts being useful at the point where someone has a shortlist and wants to know which name on it is still alive.
The flywheel is real, but it leaks, and the leak is exactly where a new app lives.
I pulled our rank data for this. Across 1,740 generic (non-brand) App Store search terms we track, covering 4,468 top-3 positions: apps with fewer than 100 reviews hold 1,464 of those slots, 32.8%. Apps with fewer than ten reviews hold 450, 10.1%. So a third of the visible top of generic search is not occupied by the review leaders. It isn’t a closed loop — it’s a heavily weighted one, which is a different problem and a more tractable one.
Two caveats before anyone builds a plan on that. Those are the terms our own crawl has discovered rather than a random sample of everything merchants type, so the mix is ours, not Shopify’s. And “fewer than 100 reviews” includes apps that have been around for years and never accumulated any, not just new ones.
On your last point I think you’re right, and I can put a number on it: of the 2,396 terms we track, 611 are brand queries — someone typing an app’s name they already knew. The other 74.5% are not. Three quarters of App Store search is someone describing a problem, and none of that traffic can reach you by browsing.
The practical read for four apps in the queue: the terms where a sub-100-review app can still take a top-3 slot are the specific ones — a long description of a problem, not “reviews” or “upsell”. Which is also where your forum-and-YouTube plan compounds, because the person who searched a specific problem phrase and the person who watched a tutorial about that problem are the same person arriving twice.
The cross-recommendation thing you mentioned is the one I have no data on at all, and I’d like some. If you do end up doing it across your four, I’d genuinely like to hear whether it moved anything.
That 32.8% stat is encouraging — it matches what I’m seeing: the flywheel leaks most where the search term is specific enough that the big incumbents never bothered to rank for it. Broad terms (“shipping bar”) are locked up; the long tail (“estimated delivery date by country”, “reorder reminder without subscription”) is wide open, and that’s exactly where a new app with 5 honest reviews can sit top-3.
On your cross-recommendation question — I can only speak from early signal, not hard numbers yet, but a few things I’ve noticed running a small portfolio:
It converts far better inside the admin than on the storefront/site. A merchant who already installed one of your apps and had a good experience is warm; a “more apps by us” card in the dashboard gets real clicks. The same card on a marketing site barely moves.
It works best when the apps solve adjacent, not identical problems — someone who installed a delivery-date app is plausibly also fighting cart abandonment, so a free-shipping-bar cross-rec lands. Recommending a second app in the same category just reads as spam.
The honest limit: it only helps once you have a base. It compounds the winner, it doesn’t create the first one — that first app still has to earn its installs through search + community + content like this thread.
Curious whether your data shows the same admin-vs-external gap — that’s the piece I’d love to see measured properly.
We don’t have that one, honestly. We track rank, reviews, pricing and keyword-level positioning, but nothing about where inside an app’s own funnel a cross-recommendation gets clicked - that would need admin/dashboard analytics we don’t have access to, not App Store crawl data. So I can’t confirm or contradict the admin-vs-storefront gap you’re seeing.
What I can say is your “adjacent not identical” point lines up with something we do measure: category review concentration. In categories like Subscriptions or Pop-ups the top 3 apps hold 72-74% of all reviews, versus 19-27% in Shipping, Wholesale or Analytics (120 categories mapped, sample is whatever’s in our catalogue at time of crawl). If a merchant’s already deep in a winner-take-all category, a same-category cross-rec is competing with an incumbent for attention in a way an adjacent-category one isn’t - which is probably part of why it reads as spam to them.
(I work on BestAppify, that’s where the numbers come from)