We launched our first public app and we’d love a developer’s read on it.
Here’s what we set out to solve. Shopify won’t let you schedule a price change from the admin. If you want a sale to start Friday morning and end Sunday night, someone’s either staying up to do it by hand or bulk editing and setting a reminder to undo it later. That question comes up in the forums constantly, going back years, and the answer is always “get an app.” The established ones start around twenty bucks a month, which is a lot to carry year round if you run a handful of sales.
So we built Hot Deals.
You pick what’s on sale (a few products, a variant, a whole collection, or everything), set a percentage or a flat amount, choose when it starts and when it stops, and then you’re done. The discount lands at checkout on its own, so there’s no code to hand out or leak onto a coupon site.
On the storefront side we ship a dedicated homepage widget, a full All Deals page so shoppers can browse everything that’s live, and countdown timers on both the product page and the cart. Plus per deal stats so you can see exactly which sale moved revenue.
All of it renders through theme app extensions, and the discount runs as a Function so we never write to product prices.
Free plan is genuinely generous, not a demo. Unlimited deals, up to 10 products in each. Pro is $7.99 when you need more room.
One thing we’d love your take on:
What would you add next? We’ve got a rough list going and we’d rather hear what’s actually missing before we commit to any of it.
Thanks for advice, though this wasn’t aimed at merchants. We built the app and came here for a developer read on the feature set. Edited the post to make that clearer.
Congrats on shipping. Running the discount as a Function instead of overwriting product prices is the right architectural call — the apps that write to compare-at prices are the ones that leave merchants with wrong prices when a job fails halfway through a restore, and you’ve sidestepped that entirely.
On what to build next, the things I’d prioritise are mostly the unglamorous correctness ones: scheduling in the merchant’s local timezone with DST handled properly, clear rules for what happens when a Hot Deals sale overlaps an existing automatic discount or a customer’s code (merchants get burned by stacking more than by anything else), exclusions by tag, vendor or a margin floor so nothing goes out below cost, and an inventory-aware auto-stop so a flash sale ends when stock hits a threshold rather than overselling. After that, recurring schedules and a Flow trigger on sale start/end would let merchants wire in their own email and SMS without you having to build a marketing stack.
The commenter above suggesting you focus on reviews before features is right, and I’d add one framing that tends to help positioning: flash sales reliably lift conversion rate but they usually drag AOV down, because discounting pulls forward single-item purchases. The merchants who do well with scheduled sales almost always pair them with something that pushes basket size in the same session — a volume break or a bundle offer on the discounted product. If you ever want per-deal AOV alongside your existing views/orders/revenue stats, that’s the metric that tells a merchant whether a sale actually made them money.
For what it’s worth we work the other side of that equation: Sleek Bundles is our bundle and volume-discount upsell app, and it’s designed to sit alongside discount tools like yours rather than compete with them, so if you ever want to test the combination on a store I’m happy to compare notes on how the two discount paths interact. And if you get to a point where the storefront widget or countdown needs custom theme work, Ecom Swift LLC (that’s us) does that kind of integration for merchants day to day.
Good luck with the launch — the free tier being genuinely usable is a smart way in.
Stacking is the interesting one, though I’d want to check before saying anything firm. My guess is it depends on whether the discounts land on the same line item or separate ones, but I haven’t tested it and I could easily be wrong.
If you get a chance to install ours and take a look, I’d genuinely like your read on it. We’ll dig into it from our side too and share whatever we find.
Per-deal AOV is a fair call, we’ll add it. Margin floor and the inventory-aware auto-stop go on the list too. Timezone and DST we already handle.
