Ranking Higher on Shopify App Store.
Not another guide.
On That Note is where I put together long-form strings of words that cover my take on engineering, commerce and the Shopify ecosystem.
It's a regular day building apps on Shopify. I have my cup of coffee, a few onboarding calls, standup with my engineers, threats from merchants to leave a scathing 1-star review for all our apps because I refuse to add a feature that's not even related to the app and not part of our roadmap and seems unnecessary and a lot of work to build, open source boilerplates to maintain and close issues on repositories.
This got me thinking - I should probably talk about ranking higher on the Shopify App Store.
The Engineer.
Seeing other engineering and management teams prioritize ranking on the App Store over building better customer experiences is frustrating. Instead of focusing on creating value and solving actual pain points, teams are more concerned with gaming the system and trying to manipulate their way to the top of the charts because that means more bonuses for everyone in the chain. This obsession with ranking higher is a distraction from the critical work of building high-quality products.
I've been under the pressure of this short-term thinking to prioritize superficial metrics over substance. Instead of building genuinely valuable features that enhance the merchant experience, I've had to work on flashy design, catchy slogans and other superficial elements that may grab the merchant's attention but do little to improve the app/service itself.
This obsession with ranking also brings along unethical and fraudulent behaviour, with app developers constantly being approached to buy fake reviews, paid downloads and other forms of manipulation to increase App Store rankings. The Co-founder of a popular reviews app did find a network of 10+ apps sharing fake reviews among each other.
We know the Shopify team is actively looking into this. Still, the fact that, in this day and age, it is possible to create a network of fake stores for reviews is beyond me. Writing an NLP model or having OpenAI's GPT-3 run through all the reviews on the App Store would provide more trust if merchants knew that the reviews could be trusted instead of allowing this to happen.
The Entrepreneur.
As an entrepreneur, and I know this is a highly toxic approach, I like that it's easy to manipulate reviews to rank higher. Hiring cheap customer support staff overseas for 24/7 support and having the engineering teams pre-build features that the merchants would ask for is great because now I can have that feature up in 24 hours and send the "Hey, it's Harshdeep - the founder. I loved your suggestion and worked all night on a crunch to add the feature you asked for yesterday. Can I have a 5-star review? Pretty please?"
I hate to admit it, but I've done this multiple times over the last few years. I've met nearly 0 resistance when explaining this to partners and developers because they, too, understand that their jobs are on the line if the app doesn't perform well and we're taking a calculated risk of having the merchant not uninstall the app. The danger is that the merchants couldn't find the functionality they were looking for or didn't want to spend the time asking for it because there's a high chance of "This is not in our roadmap right now, but I've passed it on to the product and engineering team as a priority to work on this when they can".
It always has been about pushing the boundaries of what's legal in the App Store (with respect to the App Store's guidelines) and what's ethical to do. Holding back feature sets for a handful of 5-star reviews? Unethical, not illegal. Have I met with resistance from a handful of entrepreneurs who want to do good in the world and want to avoid resorting to corrupt, manipulative practices within the App Store's legality? Yes. But they all give in, eventually, because in a world where others are not playing by the rules, not following the same practices as everyone else makes you stupid, not righteous.
You need to be ranked higher on the App Store for the merchant to understand the value your app brings.
The Alternate Way To Rank Apps On The App Store.
Shopify has introduced new measures like speed scores, app highlights, focus on embedded apps, design guidelines and straight-up bullet points on how to get featured on the Shopify App Store. I'd add in these three factors for ranking if I were the head of product for the App Store:
API Version: Jumping on the latest and greatest features deserves some boost in ranking and doing this consistently even more.
Localization: Shopify is growing bigger by the second, and having apps rank higher that have been localized for multiple regions would make more sense. While yes, translating the entire app to various languages is a daunting task, there are services like TranslateCI made for Shopify App Developers.
Uptime: This is a big one for me - only enterprise apps have SLAs for 99.99% uptime. Having an automation setup that can confirm the app is up and/or providing status endpoints like the mandatory GDPR endpoints would mean regular merchants can be sure that the apps won't go down during times like Black Friday (looking at you, Klaviyo).
Of course, there's a reason why I am not the head of product at the App Store, but I understand how platforms work and how stating these are now part of the criteria to rank higher on the App Store would affect the quality of apps. It would be entertaining to see developers of all sizes comply with these requirements and see landing pages assuring you of excellent uptime backed by App Store highlights and support more local markets.
Ranking Higher On The App Store.
Create better experiences.
There's absolutely nothing that can stop you from ranking higher by creating a better end-user experience. Of course, it may hurt you in the short term, seeing apps backed by millions of VC money come in, set up a market and go bankrupt. Still, just like SEO, the benefits start to kick in after a while, and once they do, they have a snowball effect no one has ever seen.
Take a look at this investment like going to the gym. You can train on day 1, come back home and see no improvements, but if you train every single day, consistently, for a few years, you have something that can't be bought (for most parts). So instead of crying about changes in the App Store ranking systems and guidelines, see how you can be a step ahead of others whining about it because that's additional time you have to work on this while others are out rioting.
There will always be entrepreneurs like me who flirt with the line of legalities in the App Store, but if there's one thing even I fear is a service in the same niche with a great user experience. Nothing beats that obsession in the longer run.