The easiest Shopify category to enter scored 9/100 for competition

Shopify App Store
1

I don’t think that makes it a good bet.

I pulled a scored breakdown of all 122 app categories this week, ranked by how hard they are to enter, and the top of the “easiest” list was a good reminder that low competition and real opportunity aren’t the same thing.

The single easiest category scored 9/100 for difficulty - third-party logistics - with content, notifications and sourcing tools right behind it around 13. Barely any entrenched incumbents in any of them.

Saw someone frame this well recently and it stuck with me - an empty category is usually empty because the demand isn’t there, or merchants don’t even think to look for it. You win the category and still spend all your time explaining why the problem matters.

The genuinely open lanes sat a notch higher on difficulty but were actually alive, like web push (16) or anti-theft (17) - thin on competition but with real merchant pull behind them. And at the far end you get the walls: discounts with ~1,270 apps and upsell with ~1,320, brutal to crack, but that many apps don’t pile in unless the money is obviously there.

So the number I’ve stopped trusting on its own is “how crowded is it”. A quiet category can be quiet because it’s underserved or because it’s dead, and those two go in completely opposite directions.

How do you tell them apart before you commit months to building?

2

The answer is simple: you don’t build anything right now, because Shopify is no longer a trustworthy partner.

the answer number two: you don’t build something that a vibe coder with a good AI agent can do without proper engineering.

the answer number three: you don’t build if you can already answer this question: I want to do that in Shopify, it’s not available natively, is there already an app that solves it?

4

I agree that these are important filters before committing months to building something. Especially the third point: just because merchants need a feature that Shopify doesn’t offer natively doesn’t mean there’s room for another app solving it.