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:
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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?
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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.