Is the Shopify app marketplace saturated? There is room for better apps!
Hi everyone!
So lately I was fascinated by the Shopify app marketplace because there are multiple apps making millions in revenue! That alone blew my mind.
Then this tweet came into my feed:
"The top 10 apps alone account for roughly $30b in value", it's craaaazy!
I immediately tried to come up with a few Shopify app ideas because I'd love a piece of the pie, but then I was a bit discouraged when every use case I thought of that'd make a good app had tons of competitions.
But there were quite a few apps that were low-rated but definitely had users (according to the "Sort by installs" filter and the review numbers).
What I wanted to do then is to find some that have low ratings but also none or just a few competitions.
If I do that, I could build a better competition I thought.
I'll list below 3 apps that fit these criteria - I'm still looking and probably share more later, but I'd like to spark a discussion around this "idea finding technique" and to see what you guys think of the Shopify apps marketplace.
- Widgetic (Facebook Like) (https://apps.shopify.com/facebook-like-by-widgetic)
It's definitely a useful but very simple app that does one thing: it lets you place the FB like button on your site.
When I searched for "Facebook like", this was the simplest solution for this, with more complex solutions as a competitor. I think it's a fairly easy-to-build app and people would prefer it working - and keeping it simple probably.
- Recent Product by Saio (https://apps.shopify.com/recent-product-collections)
This is another simple product that I'd imagine many shop owners would find useful IF IT WORKED.
But according to the (I admit, a little old) comments and reviews, it doesn't work really well.
- PxUpload (https://apps.shopify.com/pxupload)
According to the bad reviews, not only the product doesn't work as intended, the support of the dev(s) is not really good. It has a few established competitors I have to admit, but it was interesting to me so I wanted to include it in this post.
Does anyone else look for products with low ratings to get some ideas? If not, how do you usually get ideas for projects?
AND since we're all here and I just happen to create a project related to this (coincidence), I'd like to share that tomorrow I'll launch "Validated Ideas" (not the first iteration of this product, but this time it'll be more mature and I plan to make it subscription-based).
Validated Ideas is basically a database that consists of tens of thousands of low-rated but popular(-ish) digital products (apps/plugins) from various marketplaces.
If you're interested in VA, please give me a follow or check my Twitter profile tomorrow for the PH launch:
https://twitter.com/octopyweb
Edit: launch is postponed a little, the scraping program got a little weird.
Thank you and have a nice day!
It's also worth noting that there are many other commerce platforms that are growing rapidly but don't yet have all of the apps that Shopify has. A good exercise may be to look at the successful apps that exist on Shopify and then go build them for the other commerce platforms.
That's indeed sound a good technique. Which are these other ecommerce marketplaces that are similar to Shopify where anyone can develop their apps?
Wix,Squarespace, WooCommerce, some of these app marketplaces might have a higher barrier to entry though
Currently trying to make a little something for Wix, but there is a ton of plateforms with a lot of customers!
The good thing about Shopify is certainly the API / DX
The Shopify App Store is pretty saturated today. There are so many apps on there already, many popular apps even have dozens of copycats. This makes it hard to market apps to merchants, because there is so much noise that's keeping them from finding your app.
But I want you to know that there IS room for better apps in the world. There are thousands of merchants looking for great apps every day, and only about half of them leave satisfied that they found something useful. If you think about how many hours each merchant spent looking through the app store, plus how much money they spent on an app they didn't really like, you can see how important it is to make sure they find the right fit.
Exactly! There is definitely room for more BETTER apps.
It's also required to talk to shop owners. Maybe even an app that has 4.0 rating could be improved, let's say it has 2,000 customers, but maybe 100 of them are not that satisfied with them - for an indie hacker, those 100 customers would be enough to make $2-$3k MRR, and I'd call that a really good indie business.
This is a great post. Even we are very interested in the micro-SAAS space. Couple of things though that I would like to mention:
You were looking at the reviews and downloads, but isn't the willingness to pay the most important criteria when building a successful app? There are many apps where you can build and people will use it for free, but that doesn't mean that it is worth it to build these. In many of the examples you gave, there could be a reason why more people are not building app in this space, and that is because they don't think they can monetize.
A big marketplace that is going to have a ton of opportunity in the next year is the Chrome Store marketplace. Chrome Store is now moving from Manifest 2 to Manifest 3, and from early next year they are going to make Manifest 2 obsolete. This means there are going to be many established app there that will go out of business if they don't upgrade. This provides unique opportunity f you want to build something in that space. See the Manifest 2 timelines here: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/mv2-sunset/
Great idea about creating a list, I will be very interested and willing to pay for it.
I agree, but unfortunately, I couldn't get the paying customers numbers out of these apps in the marketplace, would be neat to somehow calculate it.
Chrome extensions are really hot and overlooked most of the times, thanks for the manifest 2 -> 3 info.
(In the databases I'm creating, there will be a "neglected extensions" table which will contain chrome extensions that haven't been updated in a year but have thousands of users -> maybe it'll be more useful than I thought since from what you're saying, those are probably will depricate since the owners don't update them often.)
Actually shopify is the best online ecommerce platform. Used by almost all the expert. But the success depends upon the strategy and expertise. I recently make a shopify store just for testing. https://beetsleather.com/
Nice! How's the store going so far? Have you had buyers yet?
How did he determine that these 10 apps "are worth more than 50% of shopify's total market cap"? I don't buy that stat.
I honestly don't know, but it's definitely good to be a little skeptic about these clickbait-y posts. But also it's not hurt to get some motivation/inspiration out of these either.