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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m curious if you could give us a timeline for when we can expect an official response regarding all the matters that have been raised over the past seven days.
It’s great to see that reviews are being removed, but as many have pointed out, nothing has really changed. It still seems to be the same policy, with no significant penalties for partners who are actively violating it.
Completely agree with the sentiment here. Re-iterating existing policies or just sweeping away fake reviews after the damage is done doesn’t solve the core issue. Until there are actual penalties for partners who actively manipulate the system—like losing the ‘Built for Shopify’ badge or facing temporary store suspensions—the incentive to cheat remains higher than the risk.
Thank you for the update. This is a positive step to create a level playing field for all developers on the Shopify App Store. Developers may suffer a bit in the short term with the transition and possible loss of some real reviews (due to the untrustworthy accounts that come with them), but keeping the review system clean is definitely the right move for the long-term health of the ecosystem. We fully support these efforts to maintain the trustworthiness of the App Store and will continue to follow the recommended best practices.
I don’t think my post is exactly the same as this thread.
In addition to the issue of genuine reviews being removed, I also mentioned two other problems we’re seeing:
Reviews from stores that have already been closed are suddenly reappearing.
Shopify sent a large batch of “Review Published” notification emails for reviews that were originally published years ago, even though nothing had changed.
Could you please ask the Shopify App Store/dev team to investigate the root cause of these issues? We’re concerned they may indicate a broader problem with the recent review system changes.
Can we submit an appeal for legitimate reviews being removed? I just lost about 5 reviews, for which I know they are legitimate.
In this post, only the removal of reviews is mentioned, in the changelog however, there’s mention of:
Developers found to be incentivizing reviews may face consequences such as the removal of a portion of reviews, demotion or delisting of your app, or termination of your Partner account.
How come, apps that had like 900 reviews removed, are not delisted or terminated? You can’t tell me these apps have not actively cheated the system.
Again, it would be great if we could get an official reply on all the matters above that have been raised by other partners.
We fully understand and respect Shopify’s strengthened review policy, and we have complied with it. When hundreds of our reviews were removed, we accepted the decision without dispute.
However, these recent incidents make us question the consistency of the review validation process. Reviews from closed stores are reappearing, and “Review Published” emails are being sent for reviews that were originally published over years ago without any updates.
Could you please check whether the review validation system is working as intended? It doesn’t seem entirely consistent.
I welcome the fact that Shopify is taking steps to combat fake reviews. What I find truly alarming is that genuinely earned reviews, even from customers who have been using the app for several months, are simply being deleted. And there are other apps which, in my opinion, are completely exploiting the system. Not a single review is lost… How can that be? See the screenshot – and that’s just one review page out of many!!
Let’s combat the misuse together, I completely agree. And we have done our part to comply with the new policies.
However, I find this execution to be at least (and not to use heavier words until we get more info on what happened) clumsy.
Keystone Loyalty Rewards lost three reviews unfairly. And in the middle of our BFS review..!
Is there a way to request an appeal to get back the legitimate reviews? We’re concerned that the review system is not working as intended. Please advise.
For everyone stuck on “but how do we even know which reviews were removed”:
The appeal process needs a list Shopify never handed us. I reconstructed my own from the Partner notification emails plus the Wayback Machine, and documented it with proof: reviews from merchants selling today, verified against Shopify’s own billing. Headline example is a merchant with 6 years of history, over $36,000 of partner earnings, and actively accruing Usage charges this morning. Review vanished.
For anyone trying to identify which reviews have been removed from their app, a tool I regularly use is https://letsmetrix.com/.
Search for your app, open the Reviews section, and select Deleted. You should then see a list of reviews that have been removed. The database appears to update fairly frequently, usually around once a day, so the information should be reasonably current.
Just to be clear, I have no connection or affiliation with Let’s Metrix. I’ve simply found it useful for monitoring app reviews, so any questions or technical issues should be directed to their support team.
Something very interesting is that one of the review we got deleted is from one of the merchants we’re working very closely with and who has been using the app for 1 years or so at the time they left the review…
Thank you @Ollie_autoBlogger - You’re the man. Some day we’ll have to find some kind of rewards to thank you for all the hard work you’re doing for the community.
" 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.
How to make an appeal? Please advise..
