I’ve considered this one as well, and I think it could be a good addition.
Yes, it won’t stop everyone, but I do think some store owners simply won’t know that incentives aren’t allowed. We all know the Partner Agreement inside and out, but they don’t.
Even better would be adding a quick “report” button there, so store owners can easily flag it if they’ve been offered an incentive.
I’d like to think most store owners also want a fair app market with real reviews, so they can make proper decisions.
I’m seeing some movement on a few of the apps using incentivised reviews.
This particular developer is the one I raised here previously, as they were hiding the incentivised review banner from developers and Shopify staff.
Interestingly, only a couple of their apps seem to have been affected so far, even though they appeared to be doing this across all of their apps. I can also see that they still have their Built for Shopify badge.
Still, this is probably the best outcome I’ve seen since I started raising this issue, so I’ll take the little wins haha.
@malisauskasLT - You might be interested in this one.
After a conversation with Claude, here are my compiled thoughts:
Really glad to see this being taken seriously — I’ve thought about this a lot over the past few years, and I think the review system needs more than tweaks; it needs a rethink.
The problems as I see them
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Reviews measure support, not the product. Read the reviews for almost any app and they’re overwhelmingly about support interactions. Support matters, but it shouldn’t be the primary signal of whether an app is good. Right now a mediocre app with fast support outranks a great app with average support.
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Ratings are polarised into 1★ and 5★. In practice, merchants leave a 5★ after a good support experience, a 1★ after a bad one, and almost nothing in between. That’s not a rating distribution — it’s a satisfaction coin-flip, and it tells prospective merchants very little.
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Reviews contain unverifiable or clearly inaccurate claims. “This app improved my conversion rate by 10%” after two hours of use. There’s no mechanism connecting what a review claims to what actually happened.
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The system is one-way, which invites abuse. Every mature marketplace — Uber, Airbnb, eBay — is two-sided: both parties build a trust profile. On the App Store, merchants carry no reputation at all. A merchant can behave maliciously or use a 1★ review as leverage in a support conversation, then do it again to the next app, and their reviews carry exactly the same weight as everyone else’s. Serial offenders should be discounted; today they aren’t even visible.
A telling symptom: merchants who leave a 1★ review and then keep using the app. If the product were genuinely one-star, they’d uninstall. Continued use signals the review was leverage, not feedback — yet it sits on the listing permanently.
- Fake reviews are bought and sold. As long as reviews are high-stakes, one-way, and unaudited, there’s a market for them.
You can see several of these dynamics play out on Shopify’s own first-party apps: expectations are sky-high because “it’s from Shopify,” which drives disproportionate negative reviews — while at the other end, most merchants are small business owners who default to 5★ or nothing.
What I’d propose
Most of these problems share a root cause: reviews are unaccountable and self-selected. So the fixes should add accountability and reduce self-selection.
- Make it two-sided. Let partners rate merchant interactions (privately, feeding a trust score — not public retaliation). Reviews from merchants with a history of abusive or leveraged reviews should carry less weight.
- Shopify-initiated review requests. Instead of partners begging for reviews (which selects for the happiest customers) and angry merchants self-selecting (which selects for the unhappiest), have Shopify randomly prompt a sample of active users of an app. That’s how you get a representative middle.
- Incentivise honest feedback through Shopify, not partners. A small app credit or a trust-score boost for completing a Shopify-requested review. If the incentive comes from Shopify rather than the partner, the feedback stays honest.
- Earn the right to review via trust signals. Weight (or gate) reviews by signals like account age, sustained usage of the app being reviewed, and the merchant’s own review history. “Used the app for 2 hours” shouldn’t carry the same weight as six months of active use.
- Relax the review-request cadence. Once per 6 months is too stringent — 3 months would be more reasonable, especially if Shopify-initiated requests take over some of the load.
None of this is exotic — it’s how basically every other two-sided marketplace already works. The App Store is one of the last major marketplaces where one side holds all the reputational power and the other holds none.
This is so backwards…
We had our BFS badge removed because we failed an automated performance check, with basically zero wiggle room or context applied (Yes, I am salty).
But a partner can seemingly run incentivised reviews across multiple apps, manipulate the thing merchants use to decide who to trust, and the outcome is just that some reviews get removed?
How on earth are those apps still live, let alone still carrying BFS?
Shopify’s own requirements talk about honesty, integrity, App Store compliance, good partner standing and "no outstanding infractions" - isn’t this behaviour an infraction?? 
Thanks for the update. Honestly, looking through this, I do not see anything particularly new in this post. Review incentivization and fake review bans have always been part of the Shopify Partner Program Agreement this feels more like a reiterated version of those same rules rather than a fresh policy shift.
That said, formatting these rules into a dedicated policy is a step toward clarity, but the real test is execution. The developer community has been seeing these issues go unchecked for a long time, so we are waiting to see some real action rather than just another announcement.
A quick question on enforcement @jzaz :
- For honest developers who might lose genuine reviews during your sweep like last year which is also outlined by @flavio-b because a fake reviewer happened to target multiple apps, what is the exact dispute or review process?
- If a legitimate review gets caught in the crossfire, how quickly can we expect Shopify to investigate and reinstate it? Or is this still non-existent like last time?
If this is going to be like the last time, I think it is better that we adopt "
" rating process like Webflow does so at least real merchants will only be giving it to the app that maters to them and we as a developer do not need to worry about existing wrongful practices and can focus on improving and optimizing their apps for best quality and features possible.
Looking forward to seeing how these measures roll out in practice.
