It certainly can be. The professionalization of the app ecosystem on Shopify has been going on for years, and it has made it more difficult to make money, but it’s still very feasible. I used to tell developers in ~2012 not to waste time building apps for iOS because the market was saturated, and I could all buy guarantee them that they would make money in the Shopify ecosystem. The pendulum has swung a little bit.
What used to be purely organic, set-and-forget growth has transitioned in to requiring a more tactical approach to see real growth. The top players in the space leverage strong review acquisition strategies to inflate their ranking, listing optimization to increase search traffic, and relationships to get featured spots. If you can’t or won’t participate in these, you won’t see as much growth.
The nature of the ranking algorithms gives an advantage to apps that have already seen success, so the initial success is the hardest part. You can use that initial success to drive continued organic long term growth.
The other thing I warn people of who are thinking about Shopify apps as side income in the support requirements: merchants are, as a rule not sophisticated. This means you generally get a lot of incoming customer support. If your store modified the front end, much of this support will be not directly related to your app, but how your app interacts with the multitudes of apps and themes the merchant may have installed.
Shopify also has rules that require you to offer a certain standard of customer support, and you’ll need to meet them to remain in the store. Support is also one of they key drivers of reviews, which are incredibly important for ranking highly and seeing that organic growth.
Source: built and managed the team behind the Shopify App Store from 2012-2017. Still involved as a participant. Always happy to chat with anyone thinking about the Shopify ecosystem.
Yes. Their app store is also a pretty good acquisition channel (I do research on this topic [1]). Here are some relevant quotes I found from my DB:
1. Credible ($2.5k/mo), a Shopify app to display recent sales:
"The other primary source of growth has been through Shopify itself. Shopify is amazing at promoting their apps. They take a 20% cut of your subscription fees, but it's well worth it in what they provide for you. When you first launch an app on the store, they feature it in the "New & Upcoming" section for store owners to get a first glimpse of your app. After you prove yourself with some solid growth and positive reviews, they will feature you in the main "Featured" section of the store. Both of these were huge for our growth. When Shopify put us on their main featured page, we netted about 180 new recurring customers." [2]
2. Shogun ($4.5k/mo), drag-and-drop page builder:
"When we launched on Shopify, sales began to trickle in and have been growing ever since. We've been attracting users in the Shopify app store from the beginning with very little marketing, and we got featured by Shopify fairly early on, which gave us a good boost. Now most of our new customers are through word of mouth or the Shopify app store." [3]
I'm also an indie hacker and I'm planning to make some Shopify apps in the near future. I totally agree with you. Also, you need to take care of your customers to have suitable revenue and a great position in the store
Thanks to a comment on this site under a post about profitable side projects (which I wish I could find again), which pointed me in the direction of Shopify and it's app store about 3 years ago.
I created Simple Purchase Orders https://apps.shopify.com/simple-po and haven't looked back. Coming from developing apps for Google and Apple app stores, they are a lot better at engaging with developers, it's not all good though, I'm currently trying to get them to remove a fake review maliciously left by a developer of a rival app.
Absolutely it can. We pivoted our MVP of a general-purpose ecommerce API integration to a Shopify App because:
- Most small/medium sized ecommerce stores we were targeting with our product were using Shopify
- If they are using Shopify, they're used to the easy installation of an app... And if they're not (by nature of being small / medium sized) they are likely to be dev-averse or slow at implementing a custom API.
- The Shopify app developer ecosystem is — on the whole[0] — a rich resource and easy to get started. If you know React, they have great tutorials to get up and running, and also a stellar UI kit (called Polaris) to make Shopify-esque interfaces pretty easily.
Because Shopify apps (even ones embedded within the admin UI - which we decided to do) are basically websites, you can leverage your own agnostic back-end and go for a best-of-both-worlds approach.
[0] - The downside to integrating into Shopify APIs is there are definitely some (surprising) gotchas, and the documentation does have some missing pieces due to churn (they release new API versions every few months). The dev forums and Git repos are, generally speaking, pretty active and most questions have already been asked.
Shopify has really strict guidelines and review processing for official themes. If you can get accepted it's probably lucrative but I wouldn't put most my eggs in that basket. Whether or not you're accepted seems to be somewhat arbitrary or at least too subjective.
You can release a theme on themeforest without all the hubub, but you're competing with a lot of developers, and there's tons of mediocre stuff so you'll have to stand out in some way.
I’m always leery about building my business on top of someone else’s platform. Especially if they can just build out the features from your idea themselves, and incorporate it into their platform as another free feature.
Then, you lose out from all that time, investment, research, and marketing that it took for you to build your business.
