Shopify Sellers Slow at Competitor Research

“I'd look beyond just the points feature when choosing an app. Check the Shopify App Store for something with strong reviews and ideally the Built for Shopify badge. You can filter specifically for those apps too. I'd also consider something that combines loyalty with other retention features like wishlists and reviews. Wishlists can give you a better idea of what customers are interested in, while reviews add social proof, and having everything connected can make retention easier to mana”

“I wonder if raw catalog size is even the main issue there, vs how often things change and how many people/systems touch the data. When you clean one of those set-ups up, what does the workflow usually end up looking like? Does Shopify stay the source of truth with better processes around it, or do you normally move that upstream into a PIM/ERP?”

“Yeah, that’s close to what I ended up doing. I reorganized the app into more of a step-by-step flow. Research comes first, where users can connect GSC and understand what the store is already getting impressions for. Then Optimize focuses on fixing the main issues, Grow has the extra tools like the blog builder and LLM-related stuff, and Track is where they can review what they’ve done and see progress. That way beginners have a clearer path to follow, while the more advanced controls are still”

“Mostly merchants. Some have a decent amount of SEO experience and others barely any, and the second group tends to ask a lot more questions in chat haha. That’s a big reason I’ve been simplifying the app lately. I don’t want to remove the deeper controls, but I do want someone with less SEO experience to understand where to start, what matters first, and what they should do next.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much the direction I ended up taking. Instead of removing controls, I reworked the workflow into clearer steps so the user knows where to start and what matters first. I even changed the menu around that idea. The flow now starts with Research, where you can connect GSC data and understand what the store is already ranking for. Then you move into Optimize to fix the main SEO issues. After that there’s Grow, which has extra tools like the blog builder and LLM-related features,”

“Ah, got it. I was reading "dashboards" much more literally. Out of curiosity, what systems do you end up connecting Shopify to most often?”

“That’s exactly the risk I’m trying to avoid. I don’t want to dumb down the app for the users who like having all the controls. I’ve been thinking more in terms of a guided path for beginners while keeping the full workflow intact for experienced users. I hadn’t really considered making those two modes explicit though. That might be cleaner than trying to make one UI work for both.”

“That makes sense, especially for POS + integration-heavy businesses where Shopify's advantages are pretty concrete. I'm curious about the other end of that spectrum though – a fairly straightforward DTC brand without brick-and-mortar or a complicated systems stack. What usually makes Shopify the obvious recommendation there, and what would make you hesitate and point them somewhere else? And once those stores are up and running, what do they still tend to need you for? Not the initial bu”

“As a Shopify novice, how exactly does one implement this: Chat widgets, session recorders, popups, upsell bars, none of that needs to run before first paint. Wait for the first scroll or tap or mousemove then fire them all at once. Payments and Shopify's own scripts and your consent banner obviously stay eager.”

“Hey everyone, I'm looking to optimize my workflow and want to know how those of you moving fast in e-commerce actually pull this off without spending an eternity on setup. I just finished setting up my Shopify store for a new product, and I spent over 30 hours grinding through the entire setup from scratch: Infrastructure and setup: Buying and routing custom domains/subdomains on Namecheap, setting up forwarding emails, and configuring Shopify Payments and regional markets and discounts. Sou”

“Nice, the zero-app baseline is the right control. Most "fastest theme" posts skip that bit entirely so this is actually useful. One thing worth adding to what butterflyplum said though, because the app delta is way bigger than the theme delta. There was a 2026 study across 400+ stores that found median mobile PageSpeed going from around 53 with one or two apps down to about 38 once you're at sixteen plus. So your gap between Expanse at 100 and that 72 premium theme is real, but a m”

“I understand your point shopify does provide a cdn which handles the compressions but themes/apps have to use them correctly but I do see lazy coding and usually they dont work on these parts. Uploading a raw 2MB image is just asking for trouble, so pre-compressing is definitely the way to go before uploading. And you're 100% right on the apps. A lot of store owners just install 10 different apps for basic features that Shopify 2.0 actually handles natively now. Keeping it lean and relying o”

“I compress the images. makes a HUGE difference. some sites i see have images over 2mb. they often won't even load on mobile. Shopify doesn't compress them and it is not handled on the theme level. the trick is not to use apps if you don't need them. many don't know that shopify has built in functionality to handle much of what they use apps for. and relying on a bunch of tiny tech companies to run a business isn't exactly the best idea”

“Spot on. That’s exactly why establishing a clean baseline is so important. If your base theme is already lagging, layering those 5+ apps on top makes the store completely unusable. A fast theme basically just gives you a bigger "speed budget" to spend on pixels, reviews, and upsell scripts. Actually, testing the real-world speed impact of those exact popular apps is my next project! Going to use this same automated setup to see which ones do the most damage.”

“Interesting. Yet it is usually large image files and third party apps which do the real damage!”

“Solid methodology, zero-app baseline is the right call for isolating theme weight. Worth flagging for anyone using this to pick a theme though: that ranking mostly evaporates once you add the apps everyone actually runs. Reviews, upsell, pixel trackers each inject their own JS regardless of theme, and TBT on a 5+ app store commonly blows past 800ms even on a fast base theme.”

“what do you think about doing a study of Lighthouse Score and Rank? I'd guess there is little correlation. but we all all want our sites fast anyway! any Shopify built theme will be fine. I would worry with some third party themes.”

“if the counter catches up in bursts, your top gainers are partly just whichever listings refreshed that week. do you make a delta hold across 2 or 3 snapshots before you count it?”

“I can see why an established merchant would feel this way. Shopify Plus can be great technically, but more flexibility doesn’t always mean fewer headaches. The app dependency and long-term lock-in would definitely make me think twice if I already had a mature store with 20+ years of history.”

“It truly is incredible. I reckon I just did three months worth of work in about five hours.”

“I'm doing an incredible amount of work by connecting Claude to Shopify. Like literally months of work in one day. It's freaking phenomenal.”

“One shopify store, three channels, me doing all of it between orders. I am on a plan with team collaboration, approval workflows, competitor benchmarking and a social listening module and i am one person ‚ nobody is collaborating with me. What i use, scheduling and the inbox that is the whole thing. So i am downgrading and the annoying part is that the cheap tiers on most platforms remove the inbox rather than the team features, which is backwards for solo sellers . The inbox is the part that ma”

“The shift from expert tool to beginner product is usually less about removing capability and more about choosing the first successful path. I would make the first scan end with exactly three prioritized fixes, each with a plain-language reason, expected impact, and a reversible action. Everything else can sit behind an “advanced details” layer. The metric I would watch is time to first implemented fix, not time spent exploring the dashboard. That should reveal whether the simplified flow is actu”

“I agree with this, more visability equals more sales. Customers who never knew you have the opportunity to discover you on shop app now. Shopify does all the marketing and maintenance for that, you just show up. Sounds good to me.”

“For the checkout/POS extensions and external connectors, how much mileage do you usually get out of Flow/Zapier/Make before you end up going custom? You also mentioned dashboards as something you often build, but reporting as something you'd usually leave to an app. What tends to make a dashboard custom-worthy in practice – the data it needs to pull together, the actions people need to take from it, or just that every business ends up wanting something slightly different? Feels like there&#3”

“Yeah, that makes sense. I suppose the tricky bit is where "important enough to own" starts. For genuinely custom business logic, owning it seems pretty reasonable. For more standard e-commerce stuff, I'm less sure – at some point you're just recreating things the platform could arguably handle for you. Do you find bigger merchants keep pulling more and more in-house over time, or does it usually settle around a relatively small set of critical pieces?”

“Since you see a lot of these from the consulting side, what usually pushes an established merchant to Shopify in the first place? And after the migration, what are the things they most commonly discover they underestimated or didn't expect? I'd be really curious in the gap between what merchants expect Shopify to simplify and what actually ends up being easier.”

“Curious from the dev side, what are the things you end up custom-building over and over across different merchants? Especially the boring/common stuff where you find yourself thinking "this really should just be part of Shopify". And conversely, what do you almost always tell merchants to use an app for rather than build themselves?”

“That's an interesting direction, but doesn't hardcoding the apps just move the maintenance burden somewhere else? You stop paying $X/month for an app, but now you own custom code that needs to keep working as Shopify changes. I can absolutely see the appeal for something small and stable. I'm less convinced merchants should have to make that tradeoff for fairly standard e-commerce functionality though. Where do you draw the line between something Shopify should provide natively and s”

“"Yahoo called these things features" is probably the most interesting point in the whole post. I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm building an e-commerce platform myself (Setka). The app ecosystem is obviously one of Shopify's strengths, but at some point it feels like the abstraction leaked. The merchant ends up being the person integrating and maintaining a bunch of software just to run the store. We're taking the opposite bet: common e-commerce functional”

“This is basically the question that led me to start building Setka. Not "how can we build another Shopify", but why does running a pretty normal e-commerce business eventually turn into assembling Shopify + theme + apps + developers and then maintaining the whole thing? We're trying to make the platform much more complete out of the box, while also making the storefront something you can create & change without needing to maintain code. Still early, so I definitely wouldn't”

“Hey! I'd been wanting to start a small subscription business on the side with Shopify, and the thing I kept running into was churn, basically customers quietly canceling. I had no real way to see it coming. No warning, no heads up, I'd just open the dashboard every now and then and hope nobody had left. So I looked into the tools people use for this (RetentionX, Klaviyo, Recharge's built-in dashboard), and it turns out they're all built for bigger stores. They need thousands of o”

“Shopify are always tight lipped about what they work on. Chances are though its in a pretty final state for the time being.”

“Yep I am over all the fiddly backend stuff (which I am capabale of handling). Small or solo business owners should be spending as much of their time building the business instead of fiddling with technical stuff.”

“The legacy-system point is probably the part I'd take most seriously here. A platform can be objectively better technically and still be a worse fit if your existing business depends on a bunch of little workflows that you've accumulated over 20 years. The app dependency can also sneak up on you, because one missing feature doesn't sound like much until you're suddenly maintaining 15 integrations for things that used to just work. I'd be curious whether you did a full feature”

Why did you never thought of Magento?

“That's impressive. Yeah, reporting is something I've always been weak on and I now can get via MCP via Claude, but I'm doing it on an ad hoc basis. It is amazing. I've been in commerce since forever and I'm a bit over 50. I'm just amazed about what we can now do ourselves without hiring someone for $200 an hour! good stuff.”

“So you're writing your own custom apps, vibe coding, that makes sense. I might give that a go. Any tips?”

“I'm researching tools / apps that price track *mostly* large shopify and few other retail platforms. Does anyone have a recommendation? I'm looking for a self setup experience and I'd like just to be able to name the companies / domains and hopefully specific categories. Does sonething like this exist that doesn't have a 4 figure subscription and "account setup and management"? submitted by /u/richardbaxter [link] [comments]”

“1,200% is huge, but I'd check the raw numbers before getting too excited about the percentage. Going from 2 orders to 26 is technically 1,200% and tells a very different story from going from 200 to 2,600. I'd also look at whether those customers are actually new, what the conversion rate was, and whether the traffic source changed at the same time, otherwise it's hard to separate Shop's effect from your SEO work or seasonal demand. If the lift is showing up consistently across s”

“Good to know it's a genuinely new customer channel though, not just cannibalizing what you already had. Seeing better margins on the Shop app orders too, or mainly just volume?”

“As an eternal skeptic, I'm not sure if it's down to all the SEO work we've been doing or if it's down to Shopify's efforts to improve product discovery on Shop in time for Q4... (or indeed, a mixture of both) As August's reports are in, has anyone seen higher conversions from Shop this month? submitted by /u/Adapowers [link] [comments]”

Awesome point on including the brand info on the product pages!

“I treat a big site change almost like a release and run through the store as if I've never seen it before. My basic check is mobile first, then product page, variant selection, cart, discount code, shipping, checkout and a real test order. I also keep a stupidly simple checklist of things that have broken before, because those are usually the first things worth checking after an update. Having someone outside the business do one checkout is gold too, they always manage to find some weird thi”

“How much does your revenue need to grow before you can consider Plus? (percentage is fine, we don't need to know your real numbers)”

“Don't just connect Shopify to GMC and call it done. Make sure you fill out all the optional feed attributes and organize the shopping feed based on how customers search for your SKUs.”

“I think that gives a better clarity. I'd also compare repeat customers vs first time buyers. If repeat purchase revenue hasn't changed but new customer revenue is falling deliverability may not be the priority.”

“That's one approach. But some plugin messing with attribution on shopify could also be causing this. I agree with you though. We'll be blind to anything upstream . We struggled with bots bloating our engagement. It also messes with this gap you talk about. We had to automate that with Inboxeagle for placement momitoring and these inflatied engagement or any anomaly. It's our smoke signal before anything seriously breaksdown.”

“I don't want to advertise any one company. Just look in the app store for B2B apps and check which ones are external portals. Those always cause issues. Claude or whatever can also help you a lot with finding reputable ones! Also, spark layer can be the right option, just be aware that it's a lot more work than a little config.”

“There is an app called Flipify that pulls matching listings from multiple platforms into one feed. I used to miss good deals because I was stuck refreshing different sites, but seeing everything in one place cut my tab count way down.”

“Great advice. You can easily overcome most of these challenges with metafields.”

“apparel cycles fast so anything that needs three months of highest-tier spend before roi is risky. since you already know the manual collection page play works, id try to validate the ai citation volume first. grab search console data and manually check a few hero collections against chatgpt/claude for the exact phrases you care about. if the traffic is there the tool makes sense. if not you just dodged an annual lock-in”

“IMO you’re both wrong. If you know what you’re doing Claude can be an absolute game changer. However the way they oversimplifies it makes me think their storefront prob looks AI sloppy”

“Great reply! But to add one thing for clarity—these are things you’ll need to address with any platform. They’re ops issues looking for tech solutions.”

“run a store in the apparel space with tons of products and beyond meta and ads I’ve been on the hunt for good SEO/ai optimization tools so I can improve traffic I don’t have to pay for. I got pitched an app that seems fairly new via email and just crowdsourcing … Their claim to fame is supposedly that the app helps optimize long tail keywords by creating optimized collection pages that get fed to chat gpt/claude via google merchant center. They also claim to have a back linking reciprocal networ”

“I run a store in the apparel space with tons of products and beyond meta and ads I’ve been on the hunt for good SEO/ai optimization tools so I can improve traffic I don’t have to pay for. I got pitched an app that seems fairly new via email and just crowdsourcing … Their claim to fame is supposedly that the app helps optimize long tail keywords by creating optimized collection pages that get fed to chat gpt/claude via google merchant center. They also claim to have a back linking reciprocal netw”

“The decision making factor here isn’t the 10k number, it’s more about what data the products will have, what will continuously need to be updated on the products, where/what they’ll be connected to. If it’s basic data attributes for a single online store in a single language with no regular updates Shopify is fine. If the data model is complex, the products require constant bulk updates, are sold on multiple sales channels etc it may not be the best solution.”

the comments here are really helpful wow

“We pull product and order data from Shopify into a warehouse using Skyvia, then have a simple Airtable view on top for the content team. Keeps things centralized without anyone needing to touch raw data.”