How much of your support load is actually merchant misconfiguration (not bugs)?

Shopify App Store
1

I’m a Shopify app developer and I’m trying to understand something honestly before building anything.

For those running Shopify apps (solo devs or teams):

  • What % of your support tickets end up being merchant misconfiguration (theme app embed disabled, wrong settings, conflicting theme changes, etc.) rather than real bugs?

  • How often do you get messages like “your app broke my theme” that turn out to be setup-related?

  • Have you ever had a bad review or churn that you believe came from confusion or incorrect setup, not a product issue?

I’m especially curious:

  • Do you currently collect any context automatically when merchants contact support (theme name/version, app state, recent actions), or is it mostly manual back-and-forth?

  • If you’re a solo dev: does support slow down shipping?

  • If you’re a team: how much time is spent just triaging tickets before real debugging?

Not selling anything here — genuinely trying to see if this is a real, recurring pain or just noise.

Appreciate any honest input (even if the answer is “this isn’t a problem”).

Thanks :folded_hands:

1 Like
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I would say probably 80% of support is for user errors or something unrelated to the app in some way. A theme issue or different app that caused the issue. This is actually good though, because:

  1. It’s usually the same issue so it’s easy to answer/create a text snippet/video to respond with quickly
  2. You can pre-emptively address these issues in your app with UX changes
  3. Even if it’s the theme or other app, I fix the issue if it’s easy - this creates trust and affinity

If it’s an actual bug in your app, it’s probably gonna take a lot longer to fix.

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Shopify’s extensions make it so simple for merchants to choose between integration options, it really comes down to communicating these options and set up steps well.

People can make mistakes, and people don’t like to read the whole manual before getting started (I’m guilty of that too).

So these issues usually come up if my products aren’t simple enough, or the set up guide is too long, or you don’t have a intuitive UI.