Is Shopify ever going to take fake app store reviews seriously?

Shopify Apps
, , ,

Topic summary

A Shopify app developer raises concerns about widespread fake reviews in the App Store, claiming low-quality apps use review farms and purchased feedback to outrank legitimate competitors. The developer notes that fake reviews often appear minutes after installation, come from obviously fabricated stores, and persist despite Shopify’s claims of monitoring suspicious activity.

Key frustrations identified:

  • Honest developers struggle to compete against apps with fraudulent reviews
  • The issue has been reported for years with little visible action
  • Developers receive ~20+ spam emails weekly offering fake 5-star reviews
  • Reporting suspicious apps to Shopify yields no apparent results

Community responses include:

  • Merchants confirming difficulty trusting reviews and finding quality apps
  • Suggestions for third-party review verification platforms or merchant communities
  • Concerns about missing data like download counts and active user numbers
  • Discussion of Shopify’s revenue structure and incentives

Underlying challenges:

  • Legitimate positive reviews are rare since customers view good service as expected
  • Incentivized reviews appear authentic, making detection difficult
  • The App Store lacks transparency about app usage, technical requirements, and real adoption metrics

The discussion remains unresolved, with participants expressing skepticism about whether Shopify will take meaningful action without significant pressure or regulatory intervention.

Summarized with AI on October 23. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I’ve been a Shopify app developer for quite a few years now, and one thing that’s become increasingly frustrating is how easy it seems for some apps to rack up, or outright buy, obviously fake reviews while genuine developers are stuck playing fair. The result is that low-quality, scammy apps often end up outranking the good ones.

There are apps with tons of “reviews” appearing from stores that, with very little effort, can be identified as obviously fake. Many of these reviews are posted within minutes of installation, often with identical or clearly fabricated wording, or from stores that, with a quick lookup, turn out to be boilerplate review-farm fakes. Meanwhile, the rest of us spend months (or years) building quality products, supporting merchants properly, and trying to earn legitimate feedback the right way. But honestly, it’s starting to feel impossible to compete.

Looking back through older threads here, this issue has been raised for years. So my question is: is Shopify ever going to do anything about it? Or are honest developers destined to be buried under a pile of bought reviews from low-quality apps?

Shopify says reviews are monitored and that suspicious activity can be reported, but it really doesn’t feel like anything changes. Some of these apps have stayed at the top of their categories for months, fake reviews and all.

In my opinion, this is one of the biggest issues facing Shopify and the App Store today. It’s killing legitimate apps and ruining the customer experience by pushing merchants towards low-quality, misleading products.

I’d really like to hear if anyone else has raised this with Shopify or had any success getting action taken. It’s disheartening when the system seems to reward manipulation instead of quality.

If anyone wants to team up or discuss ways to bring suspect apps to Shopify’s attention, or more importantly, to the attention of users who are losing out, please feel free to reach out. It’s about time this issue was finally taken seriously.

Shopify team, if you’re reading this, this isn’t an attack on you. It’s just the voice of a frustrated developer who genuinely wants to see something done about a major issue that’s affecting both users and developers alike.

23 Likes
2

Hi Ollie,

I’m a new Shopify store owner, and I couldn’t agree more—if fabricated feedback becomes “normal,” customers will stop trusting reviews and honest shoppers won’t bother writing them.

4 Likes
3

Shopify isn’t built for honesty. It literally encourages fraud. Watching these people post obvious scams and get help in being more deceitful is pretty disgusting.

6 Likes
4

For sure aye! Most apps these days, I struggle to find even one real store behind the reviews — it’s all just the same boilerplate review-farm setups. Hopefully Shopify steps in and does something about it soon, and those of us who’ve built up reviews the hard way will come out on top in the end!

I see you’re giving my app a go — feel free to reach out if you need anything. Hope you like it!

1 Like
5

I’m hoping they do something about it soon, as it’s obviously a serious problem! But looking back through older posts on this community, it seems it’s been going on for years. Fingers crossed they finally get it sorted at some point — then the honest, genuinely good apps can rise to the top!

1 Like
6

@Olllie So I think solving this would be super cool. What about a website that provides alternate reviews for a curated list of shopify apps that store owners could cross-check against apps on the app store? This could solve a couple of problems. First being illigitimately reviewed apps wouldn’t pass checks and second I am often on the hunt for a new app to do X or X, Y, and Z. Installing and uninstalling dozens of apps until I find the right one is super annoying. I just want to know what apps are actually being used in legitimate stores and what the store owner thinks about it.

Like are there any good alternatives to Rebuy that actual store owners doing a decent amount of revenue like? Or what apps are you using to drive higher AOV? Or what apps are people using for subscriptions? Should I really pay ~$1000/mo for Skio or is it all just marketing?

Maybe what I’m suggesting are two different ideas, but it would be awesome to have a way for store owners to talk to each other and help each other out. Potentially it could be a niche social network where you connect with other merchants via the apps you have installed on your store or the apps you’re researching.

3 Likes
7

Or it could be as simple as starting a new subreddit that is moderated by actual store owners and has specific rules about what you can post (must be related to store setup or apps). I see a couple of subreddits that are somewhat related but are more broad than what I’m suggesting (/AutomateShopify and /shopify_store_owners)

4 Likes
8

@Olllie Yes, there are many fake.
And also doing fake black hat SEO and making client fool.

Genuine and Real developers are stuck. It is frustrating.
Shopify must look into this serious issue.

2 Likes
9

Hello @Olllie,

Yes! You are correct. There are lot of people who pretend as a SEO export or black hat expert or engineer but there are lot of good people too. Due to this fraud from clients, the people are not trusting.

I hope Shopify take a notice on this.

3 Likes
10

Totally agree with you @Olllie As an app developer, I’ve also notice how some apps with clearly fake reviews manage to stay at the top for months. What’s worse is that I regularly get spam emails offering fake 5 star reviews and installs, which really shows there’s a market out there for this kind of thing!

It’s frustrating to see that this kind of manipulation not only goes unchecked but also gives these apps an unfair advantage over those of us who try to build real, long-term value for merchants. Like you said, Shopify says reviews are monitored, but it doesn’t feel like anything really changes. Even some of those fake reviews are so obvious that anyone who looks closely can tell.

I really hope Shopify can increase transparency or introduce stricter review validation, for example, checking if a review actually comes from an active merchant who’s been using the app for more than a few minutes. This isn’t just about fairness for developers, it’s about trust and a better experience for merchants, too.

4 Likes
12

I completely agree!

I’ve noticed there’s been a real surge in spam emails offering fake reviews recently. I’ve started saving them all in a folder to forward to Shopify, and I’m now getting around 20 a week.

Hopefully Shopify takes proper action soon. It’s a serious problem that needs a serious approach to make the experience better for everyone.

2 Likes
14

Sigh, no No NO, that is a lie to serve a personal bias.

App revenue is in SUBSCRIPTIONS, NOT MERCHANT SERVICES.

Merchant services revenue in from processing fees etc.

Revenue from subscription solutions is generated through the sale of subscriptions to our platform, including variable platform fees, as well as through the sale of subscriptions to our POS Pro offering, the sale of apps, the sale of themes and the registration of domain names. Subscription solutions revenues

pg 27 https://s27.q4cdn.com/572064924/files/doc_financials/2025/q2/SHOP-Q2-2025-10Q.pdf

This old conspiracy theory ignores reality and it’s obtuseness only serves every other cliched whiny merchant post born from false expectations that takes the form of “give me X feature I personally need so therefore a millions others must want it too; for my personal benefit” .

It doesn’t serve partners with legitimate grievances about active fraud.

It doesn’t ever serve the point of shopify ignoring their own perverse incentives as long as the trust thermocline holds.

All your doing is undermining OP’s points spreading misinformation and giving merchants looking for confirmation bias the bias they want to believe in, not reality.

This is why I haven’t been contributing to the forums for some time it’s bad enough with all the AI bots but also have refute this constant nonsense adding noise to real problems, jfc.

Fix your posts math and false conclusions.

1 Like
15

Be in the partner slack and channels this comes up a lot, and the community.shopify.dev forums; as these are the merchant forums.

To get an actual response [email removed] to a ceo on twitter etc and hope, or get in a shareholder call AND get a question in and hope.
I’m not saying posts like this are hopeless or pointless, yet unawareness that there’s 100’s of thousands of other posts is a severely limiting factor that every other complaint falls victim too.

Without an actual champion in the face of corporatism it’s post and hope .

Keep in mind the baseline shift and survivor bias so perceptually nothing has improved, from an external POV.

And it’s spread is accelerating everywhere not just for app-reviews, you can see it in practice here on these forums every day with sycophantism over substance, the perverse partner tier system to collect collab pins, the “gurus” affiliates selling dropshipping pipedreams, the “AI” tools that can’t do the things claimed, the AI first features that humans could have used years ago etc on and on ad nauseum.

As long as a the trust thermocline holds, or lack of legal repurcussions, or legislative regulations don’t exist, then getting radical action from a publicly traded company for their internal practices is unlikely to happen without mass movement.

And what type of traction have those posts ever gotten, the community forums don’t fix problems like this without ALOT of people.

What is “ALOT”? There’s millions of merchants, so what type of high percent of merchants or partners do you think need to be on this specific thread to get a publicly traded company to care about what you care about how you care about it.

Baseline shifts and survivor biases,

If the problem is bad , how bad would it be if shopify was NOT doing anything at all.

They have spam filters, and they do ban waves, etc.

If it’s a 10 gallon problem that used to be a 15 gallon problem when it goes into a 1 gallon bucket everyone on the outside still gets splashed.

2 Likes
16

Why do you attack the poster instead of the content . . . This isn’t X. Shopify provided the revenue data in their required SEC filings. Dispute their data, don’t attack people like this is social media.

17

And then who becomes the arbiter of truth. It’s a big problem and would likely take a big third party to want to take that on while simultaneously stepping on shopify’s toes.

Unless someone can figure out a simple algorithm that doesn’t hinder merchants and isn’t able to be gatekept or monetized itself.A

That’s why fake reviews get so much attention even though they are only an exacerbating problem.

fake reviews are only one noisy signal that’s highly visible so it’s something we can point out.

While the truth is the bulk of actual data real people doing research need is hidden so we can’t even point to it as a good thing.

Have you EVER been able to tell if an app is gonna need scripttags vs app-embeds, does it ever make it clear if docs are online or only inside the app, which apps use the shopify-functions system, which ones can you install but can’t use because the are Plus restricted etc etc etc :face_vomiting:

Even the comparison feature on the app store is a joke that doesn’t surface real detail, and Built-For-Shopify can barely count as a tie breaker unless that specific filter is checked even then it’s about “perf” not the actual merchant requirements.

18

It’s not an attack to call out misinformation, app revenue is in subscriptions-revenue NOT merchant-solutions revenue.

You’d know this if you fully engaged with the links you sourced or the detail I responded with to clarify why it’s critically bad info that is and was easily disproven.

19

I can’t speak for Shop app developers but as a fellow merchant it’s just beyond absurd to see Shopify as a ghost town.

As a customer who has been accustomed to checking reviews before I buy, it’s insane to know that Shopify would allow fake reviews both for the merchants as well as the app developers. For me, I see stores with fake reviews and I already know everything else is fake. I can certainly understand app developers feel the same in their own way. I’m sure I’ve passed on pretty decent apps because of the lack of good reviews. But I think more importantly the lack of reviews period. I search checkout blocks and let’s just say for example “Checkout Bear” from Conversion Bear. It has 4 reviews and 1 is a 1 star. I immediately skip it as a viable solution. Is it not possible to, after a period of time or number of transactions, require a rating to continue using the app? Cause I know most ppl don’t rate unless reminded.

I think that maybe one thing more important than reviews is the number of downloads or current users is absolutely missing from the app store. Conversion Bear for example has no doubt more than 4 users… And that’s a Shopify issue. Again, they don’t care. No one’s home.

2 Likes
20

Thanks for pointing that out. It does appear subscriptions include app sales, and that merchant solutions includes payment processing, shipping, and lending. So, I retract that statement about their merchant services including these fees, and I’ll delete that other post so others don’t see it as misleading.

2 Likes
21

I think some apps are applying some hacks to get reviews quickly. Even if we handle customization requests for that particular store only, that user won’t bother to leave a review.

I may spend 2 or 3 hours to customize the layout with CSS. The user thinks that this is expected. I am paid for the service therefore he doesn’t have to leave a review. This tactic is the suggested best practice by Shopify but it doesn’t work very well.

Some apps get thousands of reviews. How is it possible. But there is no easy way to fix it. Incentived reviews look like authetic

2 Likes
22

I completely agree. People are quick to leave a negative review, but it’s incredibly difficult to get them to leave a positive one, mostly because they see good service as simply what’s expected (which is fair enough).

The problem is that in an ideal, balanced app store that would be fine, but with the growing number of fake or incentivised reviews, it creates a real challenge for honest developers who are trying to compete fairly.

I’ve been monitoring several apps that are clearly gaming the system, but no amount of reporting or follow-up seems to get any real action from Shopify.

1 Like