I publish an app that has one review in fourteen months. So I wanted to know what actually makes a merchant leave one star, and I went and read 483 of them across 126 apps.
Support comes up in 152. Billing in 84. Something being broken in 72. Missing features, the thing I assumed I’d find, comes up 12 times.
So almost none of it is about what the app does. It’s about what happens once you have a problem: the generic reply that never gets followed up, the price that changed without notice, the charge that kept running after cancellation.
Which makes me think I’ve been vetting apps wrong. I read the feature list and the star rating, and neither one tells me anything about the part that actually goes wrong.
Before you install an app, do you read the one-star reviews and the developer’s replies to them, or is there something better you check?
That result makes sense — low-star reviews are basically a sample of what happens after trust breaks.
Before installing, I read the newest critical reviews and the developer’s replies. I’m looking for ownership, a concrete fix, billing clarity and follow-up — not just “please contact support.” A fast reply is nice; a visible resolution is the stronger signal.
@Bristan_FARRE Yes I read the one stars, but I stopped reading them for the complaint and started reading them for the reply underneath.
What I look for in the developer replies:
Whether they name the specific thing that went wrong or paste the same paragraph under every complaint. A template reply under a detailed complaint tells you exactly what happens when you email them.
Whether the replies stop at some point. An app where the founder answered everything until two years ago and nothing since has usually changed hands or quietly been abandoned. That gap is more useful than the rating.
Whether they argue. A developer who wins the argument in public still loses, and its a decent preview of a billing dispute.
Two things I check that arent reviews at all:
I email their support address with a real pre-sales question before installing anything. Not a fake test, something I actually want to know. How long it takes and whether the answer engages with what I asked has predicted month six better than any rating has. Takes two minutes and almost nobody does it.
I check where the money comes from. If signup happens inside Shopify, uninstalling ends the subscription automatically, Shopify does that on their side. If they want your card on their own website instead, you now have a subscription Shopify cannot cancel for you, and thats where the genuine runaway charges live rather than the ones people are angry about.
Worth knowing on that second point, since billing was your number two category. A fair few of those complaints are probably not what they look like. Uninstalling stops future cycles but does not wipe a charge thats already been generated for your next invoice, so people see one more charge land and reasonably conclude they were still being billed:
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/your-account/manage-billing/billing-charges/types-of-charges/third-party-charges/app-charges
Last one. Look at the dates on the five stars rather than the count. A tight cluster in one month is solicited. A steady trickle over years is real, and its also the thing that tells you the app is still maintained.
@MayraApps You’re right that I can check that, so I did.
84 of the 483 mention money. 20 of those also mention uninstalling or cancelling, and I read those 20. Nine plainly describe a charge landing after the person had already cancelled or pulled the app. Treat nine as a floor rather than a share — someone writing “they took my money after I removed it” wouldn’t match the words I searched on, so a count like mine can only miss cases.
Your mechanism is in there. One of the nine is asking a developer to “remove the $119 charge from my upcoming Shopify bill” after uninstalling the same day, which is the pending charge you describe. Another cancelled five times and was still billed every month, and that isn’t a trailing invoice. So it covers some of them and not others, and the review text won’t let me give you the split.
I tried to break the rest of the 84 down and gave up. The counts are keyword matches, nothing cleverer. I pulled the ones with “refund” expecting refusals, and most turned out to be people asking for one or being offered one. I’d have to tag them by hand.
@Icey.Lane the developer’s reply is the one thing my pile can’t see. I only kept the review text, nothing underneath it. So the signal you both go to first is exactly what I’m blind to.
I’m going to steal the pre-sales email. Same with where the subscription lives — I’d never separated billed through Shopify from card sitting on the developer’s own site. That’s what I’m going to look at next.