Hey Everyone,
We build operational Shopify apps, bulk price editors, product importers, SKU sync, and variant image tools. We’ve been doing this since 2012, so we’ve seen a few cycles.
Lately something has genuinely shifted in how merchants evaluate apps before installing, and we notice it in our support conversations more than anywhere else. A few years ago the most common pre-install question was some version of “Does it do X?” Now it looks more like, “I’m on the Dawn theme; will this conflict with my review app?” or "If I uninstall, does it leave anything behind? or “My store does 500 orders a day; will this affect checkout speed?”
These are really good questions, and some of them pushed us to fix things we hadn’t thought to test properly. The Built for Shopify process was humbling in exactly that way. We went in thinking our apps were solid and came out having fixed uninstall cleanup issues, tightened API efficiency, and rewritten onboarding that merchants were clearly finding confusing but never told us about.
Which is actually what leads to the things we genuinely can’t crack in reviews. We have merchants who’ve been with us for years, support tickets that end with “This saved me hours, thank you,” and trial users who convert and stick around. And still, getting a review feels like pulling teeth. We’ve tried in-app prompts, post-support follow-ups, timing the ask right after a successful bulk action. Noting moves the needle the way you’d expect given the feedback we get privately.
So genuinely curious, what actually makes you trust an app enough to install it on the live store? And what would make you stop and actually leave a review? Does something specific have to happen, or is it just never top of mind?
Would love to hear from both merchants and other developers on this.