This year we’re making the Shopify App Store the simplest, safest, and most personalized it’s ever been.
We’ve started rolling out a series of updates to make the Shopify App Store experience even better for merchants and developers. This includes more app education and storytelling, a stronger visual point of view, and additional surfaces for apps to get discovered.
But we can’t make the app store better without developers like you. We’ll be working more closely with you to update and upgrade your apps and app detail pages. These changes will help us get your app in front of merchants in more places.
We’ll share more frequent updates throughout the year, but for now, we wanted to give an overview of some of the changes we’ve already shipped.
An app store homepage, designed for discovery
Every merchant’s journey is unique, influenced by the products they sell, the regions they operate in, and the stage of their business.
We are making the Shopify App Store homepage more relevant to individual merchants, showing personalized recommendations, filtering out already-installed apps, and offering fewer, but more meaningful suggestions. Merchants were often overwhelmed with the choices on our previous homepage, and we’ve learned that when presented with a more curated set of apps, they’re more likely to install.
- Personalized recommendations: The first row of apps is now personalized to the merchant based on whether they’re logged in, their business type, and tenure. Already installed apps are also filtered out.
- Simplified design: The new homepage reduces the number of rows from 13 to 7 and the number of apps per row from 4 to 3. There are also new carousels that let merchants see more apps by scrolling horizontally. We tested this change on the new merchant homepage released at Unite, and based on positive results, have rolled it out to all merchants.
- Deemphasized editorial: Now that we’re getting more personalized, we’ve moved down some of our editorial recommendations, including “In the Spotlight.” Editorial will remain an important part of our app discovery strategy.
The core impact of these changes is a more personalized app store experience for merchants.
On the surface, it may seem like we’re limiting choice—but we’re actually finding that personalized recommendation rows double the diversity of the apps merchants are choosing to install.
We’ll continue to learn and try new things that help merchants discover the right apps for them.
Help merchants make decisions on updated app details page
The Shopify App Store detail page has a new look that will help merchants better understand what your app does and provide more opportunities to make your app stand out. Here’s a summary of what’s changed and how you can make the most of it:
- New visual elements: Visuals play an important role in how merchants make decisions about whether or not to install an app. As a result, we moved the product images up. These images are a larger size and can help show key use cases and features of the app across devices. We also recommend adding a video to tell a richer story about what your app can do. (If you don’t have a video ready, you can share a static image.)
- A more prominent demo store: Merchants love to see examples of how an app works, and the previous example store button contributed meaningfully to conversions. We’re now calling this the demo store, and we’ve moved it higher up on the page. If you don’t have a demo store, it’s time to consider setting one up. A demo store and video can answer a lot of questions for merchants. All Shopify developers can create a free development store to share with potential customers. Check out our developer documentation to learn more.
- Simplified design: Some of the previous content, like key benefit images, felt redundant with the other changes so we removed them. We also moved some of the content into tabs. The goal was to declutter visually and help make it easier for merchants to scan the details page without losing access to important information.
- App recommendations: We’ve added a row of similar apps to the bottom of each app details page. This helps merchants keep browsing if they haven’t found what they’re looking for yet. The apps are selected based on the current category or subcategory. Similar to other marketplaces, we’ve intentionally placed this row at the bottom of the page to ensure developers can tell their story first.
This is just the start of improvements to the app details page. We’ll continue to refine the experience as we learn more about how merchants make decisions and keep you posted on any changes to your content that will help your page stand out.
For tips on how to improve your app details page, including formats and dimensions for any media, see the updated guidelines.
You might also like: 7 Insights From the Shopify App Review Team to Set Your App Up for Success.
What’s ahead
We want to help merchants find the right apps at the right time on a Shopify App Store that’s simple, safe, and personalized. By doubling down on personalization, we believe we can help merchants and also improve discovery for developers at the same time.
In 2022, we’re going to continue to improve personalized recommendations, navigation and search. We’ll also produce richer editorial content, including more case studies featuring the apps merchants use. We’ll be adding more features to the app details page that’ll help you showcase your app while making it easier for merchants to understand the features of specific apps.
We’re here to help merchants succeed—and we can’t do it without you. Developers are a critical part of Shopify’s success and will continue to be moving forward.
And please know, we’re all ears for more feedback. You can share in our Partner Slack or reach out to partner support.
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