A lot of people on IH have recommended building an app on a growing platform as a good way to get started. With that advice, my co-founder and I decided to try building Shopify apps. After spending 2 months learning Shopify, and trying to get pre-sales to validate different ideas, we realized that we didn't know enough about ecommerce needs to really succeed on Shopify.
Before abandoning it completely, I was curious and wanted to do an analysis of the Shopify App Store to see how new apps were performing, what the best categories to build new apps in were, and generally what the odds of success were for new developers on Shopify.
This is the result of that analysis. Take it with a grain of salt, because the revenue numbers are all estimations based on reviews, but it should be somewhere in the ballpark of the real numbers. I thought this might be of use to people who are thinking about starting Shopify app development.
General Stats
There are 2426 apps on the Shopify App Store and 1323 developers. The total monthly revenue is $8.29 Million with an average of $5465 and median of $236. (i.e a few outliers making most of the money)
Free vs Paid Apps
Active vs Inactive Apps
An active app is one that's been purchased in the last 6 months
New Apps
Since this article is for people thinking about doing app development on Shopify, the most important information is how new apps are performing. A new app is defined as one that's been launched in the last 3 months.
New apps have a total monthly revenue of $58,995 with an average of $355 and a median of $27.
New developers (i.e developers whose only app is a new app) have a total monthly revenue of $18,580 with an average of $295 and a median of $49.
Categories
Now for the fun stuff. Here are a bunch of stats broken down by category. This might make it easier to identify high potential categories to develop your app in.
Total Apps
Average Price
Median Price
Average Revenue
Median Revenue
Average Rating
Median Rating
New Apps
New Apps - Average Revenue
New Apps - Median Revenue
The Bigger Picture
Looking at the data above, you might find that "Places to sell" has a low amount of competition, the lowest reviews and the highest median revenue among new apps. And maybe that's something to look into, but I wouldn't jump in and build an app in that category based on this data alone. These are just numbers, and to get the bigger picture you'll have to browse the app reviews, as well as the Shopify forums.
Conclusion
I hope you found this data useful in some way. If you're interested in getting more in depth Shopify data like sub-category stats, want an analysis of another app platform, or if there's any data that I didn't include that you think would be helpful in assessing the market and coming up with ideas, let me know!
Notes
- This is all based on data scraped around October 25th, 2018 so it isn't perfectly up to date, but should be pretty close.
- The sales to reviews ratio used in these calculations is 2.11, and this was calculated based on Shopify's report of total app revenue.
This is really nice! I would definitely interested in an up-to date analysis and if possible in sub-category stats :)
Thanks!
This is great content! Is there any way we can run these again given the recent COVID-19 boom in 2020-21?
Thanks for sharing! Can you share your methodology for determining app installs?
Oh yeah I really glossed over this and just left one footnote at the end saying "The sales to reviews ratio used in these calculations is 2.11, and this was calculated based on Shopify's report of total app revenue.".
Basically it's just estimated using the app's reviews, and our sales (i.e installs) to reviews ratio. And that ratio was calculated to fit Shopify's report of total app revenue.
How did you go about pre-sales validation? Did you abandon your Shopify app development? From the looks of it It looks depressing for new app developer.
I guess you can't totally rely on installs from Shopify app store, I think getting new installs will painful till you get handsome number of positive reviews. You need to do some marketing effort outside of app store.
What do you think about the recent Internationalization happening in app store, do you see any opportunities there?
We did pre-sales validation by cold emailing the stores that were our target market for our app. A good amount of them agreed to get on the phone with us and we got more depth from that. We did end up abandoning shopify because there just wasn't a product/founder fit.
I think the market is certainly dominated by a few players, but if you understand the ecommerce market well enough, there's probably many smaller niches for you to tackle in the app market.
And yeah I think there are more opportunities for apps focusing on different languages / countries. I recommend watching the Shopify Unite videos on youtube to learn more about this. They give a good idea of what kind of apps should be in demand.
very interesting insigts
This is one of the best posts on Shopify app store analysis. Honestly, it was one of the core pieces that I used during my research.
Since then, I came up with a framework to guesstimate installs and revenue as well which I've detailed in my Guide to making money building Shopify apps.
Hope this proves useful to anyone!
Solid analysis. I definitely think there is a lot of opportunity in the "finding and adding products" section on Shopify. A majority of the apps in that category are direct from China-sourced product. That is totally fine and certainly fills a need but there are a lot more product categories outside of that type of product that would work for Shopify store owners. I think we will see a variety of companies and Shopify app devs coming out with "Oberlo for X" such as "Oberlo for Pet Products" etc. I just launched my new Shopify app, Shop Hacker, which is essentially "Oberlo for eLearning Courses." Love any feedback from the IH crowd. You can check it here: https://apps.shopify.com/shop-hacker-marketplace
looks neat. how has user acquisition been so far? if you care about improving your install count & discovery via app store, ping me :)
Thanks for sharing !
Thanks for posting this - I ran a similar analysis although didnt get into financials, as couldnt find a quick way to link comments to revenue. I like your approach
It's interesting to see apps where they havent had a sale in 6 months. It would be interesting to see the reasons on this? One thing you notice is a lot of apps offering a poor level of customer support - so perhaps a dominant product is taking the business from these apps?
I might run this and approach some developers about selling their apps
Could be poor level of customer support, or could just be that a better new app was built, or maybe the company just stopped focusing on marketing / getting reviews. Not too sure since I haven't looked into the Shopify App Store in a while.
The idea came from https://asoft.co/shopify-apps/store-analysis I suppose.
Oh nice, that looks much more professional than mine. Curious about the hidden data like revenue per category. Are you selling this data to shopify developers or is there some other reason it's hidden?