Fake review emails - how about setting up an email we can forward them to?

Shopify App Store
1

Fake review sellers are huge problem on the app store.

They often contact app developers directly via email trying to sell fake reviews.

It would be great if Shopify had an email address that we could forward these emails to for action / follow-up.

Many of the requests come through via the ‘Get support’ button on the App store listing pages so the emails we could forward also include the offending stores myshopify urls.

This might make it easier for the Shopify to provide some automated processing of the forwarded emails to then take action a bit quicker.

The current process of reporting a merchant / partner has far too much friction to do every day.

2

Hi @Anthony_SL

Yes it’s annoying and it does add additional volume to our own support inboxes.

To play devil’s advocate, even if this was set up, what can Shopify do with these notifications really?

Each case would need to be manually reviewed, Shopify couldn’t just blanket ban on a Partner’s abuse report for a potentially paying merchant account.

These app review farms aren’t licensed businesses, and it’s not like it’s criminal activity that can be reported or even damages computed from.

The best thing you do can do is waste these app review farmers time. Set up a call with them, don’t show up.

Or better yet, show up and play dumb and just waste as much of their time as you can.

3

Totally get that. Shopify currently have automated processing for initial submissions for their DMCA forms.

I imagine something similar would be possible for evaluating and logging the incoming forwarded emails, then assessing which repeating offenders appear in the emails (and assessing which Partners the emails are coming from) + escalating to a human to review where they are deemed legitimate reports.

So much work is going into making reviews ‘trustworthy’ and relevant on the app store, but there are no tools to actually report fake review solicitations which are a huge part of that problem.

4

Hey @Anthony_SL, currently the report forms are the formal process to report this.

I see that this can be annoying and simply forwarding these emails would be easier. I’ll pass this suggestion on. We do already do that for phishing emails.

Just a thought, if you’re working with any MCP tools I’ve played around a bit with some browser tools (like browser-mcp) and you could likely offload some of that toil with a tool like that.

This was recently brought up here as well and something we are looking in to

1 Like
5

Hi Kyle,

Appreciate the helpful and detailed response! Interesting thought about the mcp - I’ll take a look.

Thanks,
Anthony

1 Like