@J_J please don’t direct your anger towards me, I am equally as angry as you are. At the end of the day the folks over at Shopify are human too.
please don’t direct your anger towards me, I am equally as angry as you are. At the end of the day the folks over at Shopify are human too.
Anger, lol? I am asking folllow-up questions to your comments and I do not think I even used a single exclamation mark.
Shopify is getting bad but review problems do not have affect on me. I asked my questions because I am developer and want to know what is thinking behind your statements.
Marking this thread as solved, woop! Great to see some progress! Thanks everyone.
Let’s continue the discussion over in the new thread created by Shopify.
The thread is just a promise, everything they written was already in the partner agreement and there’s no guarantee that we will have another legit review purge like it happened in 2025
Yes as I expected we are having another legit review purge. Already lost 10 reviews so far.
The app that was posted here and has blatantly fake reviews, stills sits at 481 reviews, 4.8 score.
If they keep doing this every year it will just incentivize dishonest players even more.
I’ve lost a handful, but some of my competitors, who are quite obviously using fake reviews and who I’ve been reporting for years, are losing a lot more!
We do have to expect honest developers to lose a few as well. I’ve noticed that many of the stores used by fake review farms leave a couple of genuine-looking reviews for unrelated apps, probably to spread out their activity and disguise what they’re doing.
We’ve just got to hope the people gaming the system are hit harder and that it ultimately leads to a more level playing field - even if we lose a couple in the crossfire.
@Ollie_autoBlogger Strangely enough, I tend to see it the other way round. In our Nice game, where – in my opinion, at least, people are clearly not playing by the rules, no one has lost any reviews. I really do wonder how that can be…
I’ve also been following the well-known example you mentioned here. Is Shopify actually addressing the fake review problem? - #89 by Ollie_autoBlogger For a short while, he was down to only about 40 reviews… (Shopify had deleted them) but now he’s back up to 106 active reviews (so Shopify must have reactivated some of them). I find that rather odd, given that he’s cheerfully carrying on with his tactics. Somehow, it makes me feel a bit sad.
Comment for Better Reach
Hey,
My thoughts have changed a little since checking my apps again this morning. Mine have been hit pretty hard, with reviews removed that I know for a fact came from genuine users who still actively use and pay for my apps.
At the same time, I’m seeing other apps that are quite obviously using fake reviews suffer little to no impact on their overall review counts.
It’s also incredibly disappointing to see apps like the one I raised earlier having reviews reinstated. They were literally hiding incentivised review behaviour across all their apps from Shopify staff, yet their punishment appeared to be the removal of only a few reviews from one auxiliary app. To then see even some of those reviews being restored really feels like rubbing salt in the wound.
I’m hoping Shopify has simply made some mistakes during the process and that these issues will be corrected soon.
I filled an appeal today with evidence that the reviews are legit. You can request an export here that makes it easier to create an appeal. I’ve provided them with screenshots with customer conversations, active subscription information etc. Now the question remains, will they reinstate them?
It’s mind blowing to see bad actors are not punished. They should be de-listed at the minimum and their BFS status revoked.
I’ve done the same. Not exactly how I wanted to spend my Monday, but it had to be done.
You can also check which reviews have been deleted here: Shopify App Market Intelligence for Developers | LetsMetrix
Just enter your app name, open the Reviews section, then filter by Deleted.
Good luck getting your reviews reinstated. Hopefully Shopify fixes this properly and starts targeting the right people. Sadly, the apps with the most obvious fake or incentivised review problems seem to have been affected the least so far.
We’ve lost 2 reviews out of 10. Which is 20% of our reviews. It’s not acceptable. @jzaz
Another interesting one. I’ll keep it anonymised, but this is an app currently featured in the Shopify App Store Spotlight. Thoughts?
It has multiple five-star reviews from stores with less than 10 minutes of recorded usage, and 59% of all its reviews come from stores that had used the app for under an hour.
Examples include:
• 1 minute: “I love the app! Very easy to use. I highly recommend!”
• 2 minutes: “One of the best web builder apps on Shopify.”
• 4 minutes: “The app’s features are fantastic.”
• 5 minutes: “Perfect for customising our store.”
• 6 minutes: A detailed review praising its layouts, templates, flexibility and ongoing updates.
Usage time alone doesn’t prove anything, but this seems like a fairly unusual pattern for an app currently receiving prominent exposure. Crazy that this is a spotlighted app…
Found a Shopify app that launched last month in a highly competitive category. It already has 30 reviews, and every single one is a 5-star review, all posted on the same day last week. Very suspicious.
The same partner also has another app that’s less than a year old. Its first review was 1 star, and then starting the very next day, they suddenly began getting a steady stream of 5-star reviews. It now has more than 100 reviews, and almost all of them look AI-generated.
These are both very common patterns. Resorting to fake reviews after receiving a one-star review is fairly low risk, as the app is often already struggling anyway. Then, if it works and there’s no punishment, there’s little to discourage them from doing the same thing with a new app.
Is the new app an EU withdrawal app, by any chance?
No, it’s a AI product description generator app.
Found this today:
On their pricing page, they have an “Unlock discount” call to action. Clicking it sends a message to their chat: “Hi Support, I’m interested in applying a discount. Could you provide me with the code, please?”
The chat agent applies the discount and then asks for a review. In my opinion, this is an incentivized review practice, which violates Shopify policy.
How is it incentivized if they don’t ask you for the review until after the discount has already been given? I don’t see them saying, “Give us a review for a discount.”