How viable and smooth is it to earn money from building and publishing Shopify apps at present?
I have a small app idea in mind for websites and online stores. I have never created any Shopify app or a Wordpress plugin before but I'm thinking that it might sense to develop this idea in the form of a Shopify app and a Wordpress plugin, one reason being that it might be easier to get some free audience through their app/plugin stores so that I can start creating a user base sooner.
But I read at a few places that it took as long as five weeks for their Shopify app to be verified and published in the store. I also read somewhere that the Shopify team had stopped taking in new apps for some period while they were revamping their store. So is it a good idea right now to invest the time into creating a Shopify app?
I released an app back in September. Got it approved in second try. Each review took around 4 weeks but it might just have been due to low staffing at Shopify because of summer vacations.
All in all, submitted my app end of July and got it approved mid Sept.
In terms of distribution, the Shopify app store is great. My app was picked as a featured app (for a week) which they are generous to do for new apps that are easy to use and follow their guidelines. This gave me an initial 100 users (25 remained as paying).
Since then I have been able to grow the amount of users to above 500 (with 120 paid monthly subscriptions). All of my users come from the app store. Was lucky to hit #1 on trending for 4 days leading up to BFCM, which gave a boost of 700 installs.
In regards to the “making money” part, so far I have $600 in revenue and 120 subscriptions ($10/mo). It is definitely not a way to make a quick buck. On the side of my full time job I spend on average 15 hours per week on support, developing new features and marketing. And there is a lot of competition, at least in my space, who are quick to adjust.
On the plus side, a lot is given by Shopify in terms of distribution, marketing, billing and invoicing.
My gut feeling is that Shopify users are more prone to paying for apps than WordPress users, so I would choose Shopify and focus entirely on making that work instead of trying to spread your efforts on two very different platforms.
That's interesting info. I agree with the idea to stay focused on one platform rather than stretching myself too thin. If you don't mind sharing, what was your app about or the domain it belonged to?
And what stack did you use to build the app? Would you recommend any tutorial series or other resources to get going building a Shopify app?
The app belongs to the Sales and discounts category.
I have built the app in .NET using ShopifySharp (API client) and the Serverless framework. Deployed to AWS.
I used .NET because that is what I am most familiar with. Did not really use any tutorials, only the Shopify developer resources (which are great!).
If you are a rails developer, I know there are a lot of good resources for that also.
I have released an app 2 weeks ago.
It took about 3 weeks to get the review process started by the shopify QA Team. I had to make a few changes and it took another week until the app was finaly approved and in the app store. So in total all this took 4 weeks.
I did have connected stores and also paying users before I even started the review process so maybe this made the review process easier for me.
As far as free audience goes. I have trippled my installs just by beeing on the app store.
https://imgur.com/a/OivBt3Z
I see. To me that seems like a very long and uncertain process for working out on experimental ideas.
I believe that is intentional. They want to make sure apps in their official app store are of a certain quality before putting their stamp of approval on them.
You can still develop and market your app outside of the app store if you have another way of reaching potential users.
Thank you for sharing your story.
How did you get early users to your non-verified Shopify app store?
I'm interested in this as well. Have been pondering creating a Doka app for Shopify, but not sure about the market. So watching this topic.