How To Make More Money Selling Shopify Apps In 2021 — Smashing Magazine

Four Ways to Build a Shopify App That Merchants Actually Keep

Building a Shopify app that is technically sound is only half the work. Convincing merchants to install an unreviewed app from an unknown developer is a separate challenge entirely. The good news is that the opportunity is real: 87% of entrepreneurs rely on Shopify apps to run their stores. Consider the success of a tool like Free Shipping Bar—nearly 10,000 reviews with a near-perfect rating—and the math on a $9.99/month plan becomes clear.

That kind of traction isn’t accidental. It comes from building the right product in the right way. Here are four areas to focus on to give your app the best chance of enduring success in the Shopify App Store.

Find the Gap, Not the Crowd

The App Store is already saturated with apps that merchants trust. Building yet another version of a well-established solution is a losing strategy. The goal is to identify needs that aren’t being met and fill them before anyone else does.

Start with research. Look for fresh “state of e-commerce” reports—ideally from the last six months. Shopify’s own Future of Commerce report is a good starting point for spotting shifts in merchant behavior and consumer expectations.

Don’t settle for general trends. Dig into specifics:

Once you have a list of potential ideas, check them against the existing App Store offerings. For instance, buy-online-pick-up-in-store (BOPIS) apps are plentiful, with many having substantial download counts and positive reviews. Competing with that kind of established presence is an uphill battle unless you have a genuinely novel approach. Cross that idea off the list and look for an opportunity where you can make a clear mark.

Key resources:

• Review the Shopify Future of Commerce report for trend signals that point to unmet needs.
• Read reviews of existing top apps in the App Store to learn what merchants are complaining about or asking for.

Speed Is a Feature, Not a Luxury

Every app a merchant installs adds a potential performance tax to their store. If you make their site sluggish, you’ve given their customers a reason to leave—and given the merchant a reason to uninstall you. It’s also not just the storefront that matters. An app that drags inside the Shopify admin or POS hampers the merchant’s own productivity, and they won’t tolerate it for long.

Performance issues also become your problem. Slow loading leads to negative reviews and rising uninstall rates, meaning more of your time spent on troubleshooting.

Authentication is one common bottleneck. Embedded apps that integrate with Shopify’s UI pass through a series of OAuth steps. When session cookies aren’t stored, the app is forced to make a round-trip to Shopify’s OAuth on every load, which is where the slowdowns creep in.

The fix is to use session tokens in place of session cookies. This removes the need for OAuth on subsequent loads, saving time after the initial install. Shopify has documented the performance gains from this approach:

This works because AppBridge stores the session information your app needs to load it quickly.

Key resources:

• Learn about the impact of page speed on engagement in Shopify’s research on site performance.
• Know the tools merchants use to check speed: the Online Store Speed report and the Core Web Vitals app.
• Follow Shopify’s tutorial on using AppBridge to improve embedded app performance.

Your Listing Is a Search Engine Problem

Being a great app is irrelevant if no one can find you among the thousands of other apps in the store. You need to optimize your App Store listing for search—and not just for the App Store itself. The same listing needs to perform well on general web search engines like Google. The top results for a query can differ significantly between the two platforms, so your listing has to do double duty.

The tactics aren’t wildly different from standard SEO for a website or a mobile app. The focus is on how you present your app.

Design Sells From the First Scroll

Stopping at the screenshots lower on the page is a missed opportunity. The top of your page is prime real estate. Consider the Seguno: Email Marketing listing, which immediately greets visitors with a video featuring real people. Video content is quick to digest and builds trust memorably.

The page for Discount Code, Discount Pop Up uses another effective approach—rich graphics right below the hero section that visually explain key features and benefits. This persuasive element helps merchants immediately grasp what the app can do for them, making an earlier conversion case than screenshots alone.

Copy That Converts and Ranks

The language on your listing page has two audiences: the merchant reading it and the search engine indexing it. Effective copy serves both.

Use every field Shopify gives you. Each detail you fill in is potential relevant information for a merchant searching for a solution, even if you think it’s minor.

Keep the tone conversational. Jargon-heavy, salesy prose alienates merchants. Plain language that calmly explains exactly what the app does builds more trust. Keep paragraphs short and information easy to digest.

Pick a single primary keyword for the listing. Google’s free keyword planner tool is a smart place to research volume and competition. For a basic type like “shopify currency app,” you’ll see competition levels.

“Low” competition is your goal—but that means nothing if there’s no monthly search volume. You want a keyword that has decent traffic but isn’t impossible to rank for. In the case of currency apps, “Shopify currency converter” is likely a better target than “shopify currency app,” because it matches user intent more precisely.

A quick Google search for “shopify currency app” shows why:

Notice that most of the top results use the phrase “currency converter” in their titles. Once you’ve settled on your keyword, make sure it appears naturally in these locations:

• The app’s headline (especially if it’s not in the app’s name);
• The list of features or benefits;
• The app description;
• The meta title and description of the page.

Proofread everything. A listing full of typos tells merchants you didn’t take care with your own product page. If you skipped QA on your copy, they’ll reasonably assume you skipped QA on your code.

Market Off-Platform

Your listing is where traffic converts, but you have to generate that traffic. Promotion is your responsibility. There are several avenues for this:

• Send a press release for the launch event.
• Build a separate marketing website with a blog to generate leads via email.
• Use social media accounts dedicated to the app to participate in relevant conversations.
• Create YouTube tutorials that help merchants maximize the value of your product.

Keeping quiet about your app is leaving the customer acquisition field to more vocal competitors.

Key resources:

• See how Shippo structured a winning app listing.
• Learn the development and promotion practices that drive downloads.
• Get specific tactics for marketing your app.

Support Is A Revenue Strategy

Treating a Shopify app as a set-and-forget project is a fast way to lose merchants. Support is now a publicly visible part of an app’s reputation, and merchants know exactly where to find information about the tools they rely on.

What matters is that your App Store listing makes it easy for users to find what they need. The Oberlo app page offers a straightforward example: four distinct support links that guide users to the help center, developer website, privacy policy, and direct support contact.

Some developers go further. The app page for Back In Stock: Customer Alerts includes a support phone number and email address directly in the listing, removing friction for merchants who would otherwise have to visit the developer’s site to track down the details. Even if a user still clicks through to the site, the transparency builds trust.

That trust shows up in the App Store’s star rating. Reviews are not just social proof; they are a ranking factor. An app with fewer than four stars can easily be passed over by potential users scrolling through search results.

Effective support directly affects those ratings, which in turn affects visibility. To keep that cycle positive, focus on a few habits:

• Build out a self-service knowledge base so the team can devote attention to requests that truly need it.
• Automate what you can, including monitoring reviews for complaints and trends.
• Reply to every contact—general queries and support tickets alike—within 24 hours, and resolve issues promptly.
• Answer negative reviews publicly and professionally within a day, without taking the criticism personally, and work to resolve the underlying problem quickly.

Merchants interpret an unsupported app as an abandoned one. Ongoing, visible support reassures them that you will keep the software running for their store, not just at launch but for the long term.

From Single App To Sustainable Business

Profit in the Shopify ecosystem does not require you to ship a large volume of apps. One well-designed app that genuinely changes how a merchant sells can generate income for a long time—but only if it satisfies a current need, works without issues, and is backed by solid support.

The key is persistence. Building the app is only one part of running a business in the Shopify App Store. Optimizing the listing, marketing the product, and supporting users after installation are what turn a one-off release into a predictable, steady revenue stream. A successful app developer treats the Store as a channel that needs constant attention, not a publishing platform for finished products.