Our 1st app was approved on Shopify App Store on 24 Nov 2020!
Here are what happened in the last 12 months👇
1. Missed out charging 1st few customers due to:
- Our unfamiliarity with app billing cycle
- Long (14 days) & thus confusing (in billing cycle context) free trial
- Overlooked a new billing API rolled out by Shopify at the same time as our app approval.
We eventually updated our billing API after sitting thru 2 billing cycles 😅 without getting paid. The app’s free trial has also since been shortened to 5 days, this doesn’t stop our customers from evaluating the value of our app as our app takes less than 15 mins to setup.
2. Got tanked by troll review
With Zapier, we set up a support notification to ensure we get to our customers ASAP.
A customer(?) decided to leave us a 1 star review because no one answered his non-existent support ticket🙃 Our rating got tanked to 4.1
(it’s now back to 4.9)
3. Price hike un-hike
Five months in, we decided on a price hike. Unfortunately it (seemingly) brought down our already-slow install rate, so we ended up reversing it.
In hindsight, we should’ve given it more runtime for larger sample size.
4. Rebuilt 40% of our app
Shopify gave a nice surprise of 0% commission 😚 + the new App Block implementation for OS 2.0
We end up rebuilding 40% of our app – not complaining though. I believe this would reduce our churn rate as more stores adopt OS2.0 in long run.