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
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.
Ignoring bad actors for a moment, I’m pretty sure if you shortlisted some apps with high reviews ,you think are suspect, you’d probably find a portion of them clearly communicate some sort of ROI inside the admin.
Though I particularly like seeing a new app where all store reviews are from the app devs small country.
It’s like they are spending actual money to setup shops just to have some initial reviews.
But that is heavy speculation as the “hack” can also just be good local marketing while in beta.
And that’s the problem it’s not always clear how to define or identify bad actors.
lets be real that has nothing to do with bad reviews and all to do with bad process.
How would you ever scale something like that to get “thousands of reviews” there’s only 24 hours in a day.
There’s a reason shopify has a design policies, and most apps and even do ,or customization as a separate fee or separate program of developer recommendations.
If your trying to climb a competition ladder then sure artisanal-manual-bespoke-hand-crafted CSS is the way to go.
Yet still probably need to be more aggressive in turning that extra work into a review in a way that falls within the partner terms.
If custom styling is spending 100 hours for 1 review something is broken.
That’s not providing a sustainable service at that point, that’s just being a host for parasites who will feast.
towards @jam_chan’s point, most want EXTRA service for FREE and expect it to the point of anger if they don’t get it.
Shopifys marketing ecosystem builds a false sentiment for that attitude from the get go; especially for any merchant with a slight hint of drop-shi pping fantasies.
This is why we might laugh at apps/services with seemingly absurd pricing as “greedy” but it’s the simplest method to pre-filtering out a LOT of chaff that are always greedy with others peoples time.
You nailed it! @Olllie This is a major trust issue in the App Store ecosystem. The “review-inflation” problem doesn’t just hurt developers, it erodes merchant confidence too. I think Shopify and its merchants (especially the ones creating legitimate apps) could really benefit from more transparent review validation like flagging reviews made within minutes of install or verifying store activity before counting the rating. Feels like this is something we need to push on together.
@webgility_hq - Totally agree. There’s clearly growing demand from both developers and merchants for Shopify to tackle this properly. It’s no longer just a few bad reviews — it’s become a genuine trust issue across the whole ecosystem.
Shopify already has the data to spot this stuff. Reviews from brand new stores, zero-sale stores, or cloned shops should be obvious red flags. It just needs proper enforcement.
I’m all for working together on this. I’m currently digging into one app that looks particularly dodgy as a bit of a reporting test case, so if you’re keen to help flag it, feel free to DM me and I’ll share the details.
If you want to push this you need to be on the dev forum, not here.
https://community.shopify.dev search first for existing threads before posting before I’d also say the partner slack but their killing that off probably in part because of other complaints like this consolidating in the channels /shrug
For a “within in minutes” problem is only an issue the algo over weights recent reviews.
But IMO from I vaguely remember recency is more about letting old stale reviews(read: bad) be able to fall off.
If you want to push this you need to be on the dev forum, not here. before I’d also say the partner slack but their killing that off probably in part because of other complaints like this consolidating in the channels
Step 1: create app listing with target address
Step 2: funnel “marketers” to a bot-honeypot, while a scraper tries find out if they are a shopify-partner
Step 3: when they make the offer of fake review forward to shopify partner program and legal.
Hey @PaulNewton – I think the public Shopify Apps community section (right here) is the perfect place to raise and discuss the fake review problem. This isn’t just an issue for partners or developers; it’s something that seriously impacts Shopify store owners too, as it makes it much harder for them to identify and choose genuinely high-quality apps.
If you want actual traction, or more importantly even the slightest likelihood of an actual shopify-staff member saying ANYTHING on the matter(even just a “we are aware”) then also use the dev forums.
I get wanting merchant involvement, yet the reality is forum-merchants NEVER consolidate or follow through with any substantial action in the forums even for issues that DIRECTLY impact their business they label as “critical” or “important”.
It is very much championless slacktivism , so lazy it will even resent the idea of someone suggesting effort.
(see diasporas of: checkout customization restrictions, unchangeable url structure, app resentment, sell by the measure, etc etc etc ad nausem).
That they’d consolidate for third parties concerns is a stretch of the imagination.
But what do I know Its not like I’ve used the merchant forum for over a decade and seen every issue like this under the sun whither away especially the ones that think location location location doesn’t apply to them too.
Hey Paul, you’ve raised some good points. I’m going to cross-post this thread to the developer channels to see if we can get some traction there as well.
Glad to see you’re actively looking into this! I’m definitely interested in helping out, you can share the details! Hopefully, we can make it easier for Shopify to identify and address these shady practices more effectively!
Has anyone found a way to reduce or eliminate contact from dev stores marketing installations and app review services by the hundreds? It clogs our ticket system and dilutes genuine support requests with spam.
They’re such a pain, aren’t they? I had six come through within just a few hours the other day. No progress yet on getting it sorted, but I’m currently pushing Shopify to set up a dedicated inbox where we can forward these fake review offers. That way, they can trace and block the accounts behind them, and hopefully start removing partners who’ve been taking advantage of them. It’s something they really should have had in place ages ago, but with a bit of pressure, maybe we can get things moving.
No major updates yet — I’m just continuing to put some friendly pressure on Shopify where I can, and thinking of new ways to spread the message more widely. If you’d like to help, you can report an app I know is gaming the system. Just send me a private message and I’ll share the details so you can decide for yourself. I’m starting small for now, trying to get Shopify to take action on one smaller app before moving on to the bigger offenders. No luck so far, though!