We scored 237 apps in one Shopify category because the star ratings were useless

I spend a lot of time crawling the Shopify App Store, and this is the clearest case I've run into of ratings just not doing their job.

Picked one category — returns and exchanges apps, 237 live listings — and looked at what the storefront actually shows shoppers. Of the 111 apps that have any reviews at all, 101 sit at 4.5 stars or higher. When almost the whole category clusters at the top, the rating stops telling you anything about which one to pick.

The other 126 of the 237 have never been reviewed at all — not low-rated, just never reviewed. And five apps hold 54% of the 10,345 reviews the whole category has earned, so the review count is as lopsided as the star rating is compressed.

I re-read every shortlisted listing live on 21 September 2026 rather than trust a stale crawl, so the pricing below is current: entry prices in the category run from $4.99 to $179. And of the negative reviews that do exist, 57% are about support, not the product itself — worth knowing if you're trying to judge a tool by its complaints.

The caveat: this is one category, one snapshot, one day. I don't know yet whether returns apps are unusually skewed or whether any mature Shopify category looks like this once a handful of players have spent years compounding reviews.

If you're shipping into a crowded category with zero reviews yet, genuine question — does that actually cost you conversions, or only once a buyer has something to compare you against?

(I work on BestAppify, that's where the numbers come from)

https://merchants.bestappify.com/blog/best-shopify-apps-to-reduce-returns-52