About a month ago I reported an app for incentivising reviews. We noticed them receive a significant amount of reviews in a short period of time, most of which were left within a few minutes of installing.
I installed the app myself to take a look and was immediately offered $60 in exchange for a review. I reported them for incentivising reviews and a day later got a reply from Shopify asking for proof. I submitted a screenshot and then never heard anything. This app has received a bunch more reviews since, one of them explicitly saying they left the review to get the $60.
I’ve reported them again since then. In the meantime, they surge up the app store rankings and push the legitimate developers down.
Which leads me to my two questions:
How do reviews like these make it through the approval process? All of the reviews for our apps are delayed by a day or two while Shopify supposedly reads and reviews them. Surely this app gets the same treatment; how does this make it through?
Has anyone had any success with the partner violation form?
The review system has been subject to abuse since the beginning of time so I assume this reporting system gets a workout. Still, I’d like to think Shopify would like to stay on top of blatant abuse such as this. We know a lot of developers purchase/incentivize reviews, but this particular developer isn’t even trying to pretend otherwise. If left unchecked, it will continue to erode the value of the app store for both merchants and developers trying to do the right thing.
I also hope the action is more than simply removing the one review that says they were incentivized - all of their reviews are potentially illegitimate.
Ideally Shopify would just remove the bad actor from the ecosystem completely; there are plenty of developers doing the right thing to replace them.
Hey @RyanPhillips - thanks for reaching out and sharing your experience, I definitely understand where you’re coming from. Happy to take a look into this with you over DMs if someone hasn’t already reached out to you on this - just let me know and I’ll ping you on my end here.
I have a similar issue here.
I have noticed that a Shopify App Developer is asking for reviews in their app in a guilt inducing way, making merchants feel obligated to leave a good review for their app. They are directly violating Shopify Partner Agreement, Part C, section 2 (Unauthorized and Prohibited Developer Activities), subsection 1.
I reported this in June 2025 and nothing happened.
As this app developer is still asking for reviews in such a way, I reported them again in August 2025 and again, nothing happened. They are still asking for reviews in such a way and their app is moving up the ranks on Shopify App Store with tremendous speed.
Now, I noticed that another app (their competitor) has started to ask for reviews in the same way, as they probably figured out that this simply works as they get tons of 5 star reviews every day.
You can see how they ask for a review below in the screenshot. I am sure that this isn’t allowed, as there are guidelines by Shopify on how to ask for reviews correctly and they are basically using all the tactics that are listed as forbidden.
@Alan_G can you maybe check into that? Apologies for tagging you on this post, but I don’t know what else to do here.
Hi @Oliver - thanks for reaching out. My team doesn’t handle these reports directly, but I’m happy to see if I can look into this for you and at least provide some next steps. I can’t guarantee anything in terms of outcome, but I’ll DM you here in the forums just to grab some more info and see if I can get in touch with some folks internally for you. Speak with you over DM shortly
Making a quick post here publicly (for the benefit of anyone who might be reading this thread!) to mention that for updates on any reports you may make to our team through the reporting feature here: Report a partner violation - Shopify, you can reply to the message you should receive from us in order to automatically be signed up for updates on the investigation.
Please don’t hesitate to ping me here though if I can help out/clarify anything on my end.
