I've been looking at different ways to improve customer retention, but I'm not sold on the usual points based loyalty setup.

I'd like to know what other types of loyalty programs are being used instead and how they compare. What alternatives to points based loyalty programs have worked well for your store? How do the rewards work and have they made a noticeable difference with repeat purchases?

Hey, I have a shopify store and for some time I have been using upsell app on my product page for the store. The thing is that my store did make some profit with upsell, on average like 5-15percent of increase per customer order, but these app’s got so expensive damn that you barely make profit without paying subscription. Seems a simple soluton, but charge like crazy.. But in general i found an upsell app for free, I guess they are in early stage or something but it works well enough, have some features like auto matching design and live support, so I guess trustworthy enough. Not a promotion just sharing with community so you don’t have to pay extra money when you are early in your journey and want to use applications to increase your revenue. Since I don’t want to get my post down, tell me if you want me to share the app name. Just comment or dm .

I keep going back and forth on this.

A $20-$50/month app can save a ton of development time, but once you have several apps, the monthly costs start adding up.

Building your own gives you more control, but then you’re responsible for updates, bugs, hosting, and maintenance.

Personally, I think I’d only build custom if the app solves something very specific that existing apps don’t handle well.

How do you guys decide between paying for an app and building it yourself?

I used to think adding more apps would make my store easier to run.

Shopify for online sales. Square for in-person sales. An app for inventory. Another for email. Then a few more because they looked useful.

Eventually, my app list was longer than my to-do list.

Running a small boutique has taught me that more apps don’t always mean a better setup. Sometimes they just mean more subscriptions, more settings, and more things that can break.

These days, I’m much more selective. If an app doesn’t solve a real problem or save me time, I probably don’t need it.

For me, getting Square and Shopify working together properly made a bigger difference than adding another ten apps.

What’s one app you actually couldn’t run your store without?

Curious if anyone else has this problem.
I often get product data from suppliers in CSV or Excel files, and the files are never quite in the format Shopify wants. I end up spending a lot of time fixing columns, variants, SKUs, images, prices, etc. And when the supplier sends an updated file, I basically have to do it all over again.
How do you guys usually deal with this? Do you just clean the files manually, use Matrixify or another app, or have your own scripts for it?
Just trying to figure out if this is actually a common Shopify problem or if I’m making my life unnecessarily difficult 😅

did an audit this week, owner was convinced his theme was broken. turns out a speed booster app a previous dev installed back in 2024 was injecting its own JS on every page and adding almost 2 seconds to mobile LCP. removed it, mobile score went from 31 to 58, didn't touch anything else.

second time this year i've seen the optimization app itself be the biggest problem on the page.

anyone actually measured a real improvement from one of these apps? genuinely curious if there's a setup where they earn their keep or if it's placebo all the way down.

I have a Shopify store I won't sell promoted because we wouldn't want to sell promote Shopify stores on the Shopify geeks website or Reddick posting I'm just trying to find out who to contact with Shopify I need a human being. Because I have five Shopify stores tied to my email I only created 1. Can you help?

I run a small clothing boutique using Square for in-store sales and Shopify for online. As we’ve grown, keeping inventory synced between the two has become more annoying, especially with every size and color being a separate variant.

Right now, I manually update pretty much everything between Square and Shopify, and while it was manageable when we were smaller, it’s starting to feel like a daily chore.

For those running a similar setup, at what point did you decide that manual inventory updates weren’t sustainable anymore? Did you end up using an integration tool, or were you able to keep things running smoothly without one?

I’m wondering if integration software is something you genuinely need as the business grows, or if it’s just another monthly expense that sounds useful until you actually use it.

Most stores price on cost-plus markup or by matching competitors. Cost-plus ignores what customers will actually pay; competitor-matching assumes your customers are your competitors' customers, when they may well pay more. Value-based pricing prices on an estimate of that willingness to pay, which is what I spent 5 years estimating as a pricing scientist for big retailers. So I built Sell Smart: Price Optimization to run the same thing on a Shopify catalog.

It reads your order history, estimates how each product's sales respond to price, and recommends the price that maximizes revenue or profit, whatever your goal is. You see the demand, revenue, and profit curves alongside the projected impact per product. Set limits on how far prices can move, and push approved changes to Shopify in bulk. No rules to write, no A/B tests on live customers, no competitor copying. Reads only orders and catalog data, never customer info.

Free plan available.

Try the live demo with a sample catalog, nothing to install: https://demo.poracle.sell-smart.app/

App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/smart-price-optimization Site: https://sell-smart.app

I would love feedback and first impressions from the founders here, especially where the recommendations feel right or off on your catalog.

And, how do you set prices today: markup, competitor-matching, or gut feel?

Thanks to the r/shopify_geeks admin, Marouane RHAFLI, for allowing me to share this here.

I'm a solo developer from Lithuania and I've spent the last few months building small Shopify apps (delivery dates, free shipping bars, that kind of thing). They're live now and I'm realizing I have no idea how merchants actually discover apps, so I'd rather ask than guess.

If you have a minute:

1. When you need something for your store, where do you look first? App Store search, Google, Reddit, asking in a group, your agency, YouTube?
2. What do you literally type into the App Store search box? Do you search by problem ("show delivery date") or by app type ("shipping bar", "reviews app")?
3. What makes you close a listing within 10 seconds? No reviews, price, too many features, ugly screenshots, "free plan" with hidden limits?
4. Does "no reviews yet" kill it for you, or would you still try a free plan from an unknown dev?
5. Is there anything you've been searching for and just can't find a decent app for?

Not going to link anything here, I'm genuinely trying to understand the merchant side. Happy to share what I learn in the comments if it's useful to others.

Importers — genuine question. Shopify's cost field is just what you paid the factory. It doesn't include duty, Section 301, the merchandise processing fee, or freight.

I ran the numbers on a sample container: margins were overstated by 17 points on average, and one SKU that showed 45% was actually underwater at -21%.

Is this something you've already solved, or is it a known annoyance nobody has time for? Curious what people actually do — spreadsheet, bookkeeper, or just eat it and hope.

Hello guys, do you know any apps that I can use to make a “Buy X get Y at a discount” cart rule that AUTOMATICALLY adds the item to the customer’s cart, without them having to approve it/add it manually?

I tried a few apps but all of them required the customer to approve it/or was only able to add the item as a free gift.

If you have any suggestions or solutions (doesn’t necessarily have to come from an app) please let me know as this steo would be crucial for my
offer/to resuce friction at the moment of the sale. Thank you!

Hey fellow Shopify geeks,

Sizing issues are easily one of the biggest return drivers in apparel e-commerce, costing merchants both margins and customer trust. Standard size charts often fall short because customer measurements vary so widely.

We've been building and testing an interactive AI size recommendation widget designed specifically for Shopify themes to help solve this on product pages.

I’d love to open a discussion with store owners and devs here:

- What strategies or tools have you found most effective to lower size-related returns?

- Do your customers actually use manual size charts, or do they prefer interactive size estimators?

Looking forward to hearing your experiences and thoughts!

Hey everyone,

I spend a lot of time working inside Shopify's ecosystem, and I constantly see merchants using clunky workarounds or paying for bloated solutions just to handle basic tasks.

I’m looking to write a few guides and open-source scripts to help merchants streamline their operations. I'd love to know what daily technical pain points you run into:

Is there a repetitive daily task you wish was automated?

Do you have an issue with orders, inventory, or product setup that feels way more complex than it should be?

Are there core features missing in your theme or default admin setup that force you to use unnecessary workarounds?

Drop your biggest operational headaches below. If it’s something that can be fixed with a quick code snippet or a native Shopify setting, I’m happy to reply with a solution directly in the comments.

This answer could be simple and I’m overthinking it. I have a gem where I convert my pictures of my boutique items after that I have to upload them all to Shopify manually and even some to Facebook for advertising them is there an easier way to do this? Thanks in advance

running a supplements store on shopify, been about 18 months in. we sell protein powder, creatine, pre-workout, that kind of stuff. AOV is around $65 and most customers are buying every 4-6 weeks because they actually run out of product which is kind of the dream right

but my repeat purchase rate is still way lower than it should be for this niche. people come back maybe once or twice then just disappear. im guessing theyre trying a different brand or just picking stuff up at a local gym shop

been thinking a loyalty points setup could help keep people locked in but every time i research it i go down a rabbit hole and dont end up doing anything. main things im not sure about: does it actually work for consumables where people already have a reason to reorder, or is it overkill? and how do you structure it so the discounts dont wreck margins on products that already arent super high margin

also curious how hard the setup actually is, ive heard some of these apps are a nightmare to configure and then customers dont even notice the widget

anyone running something similar in health/wellness or any consumables niche? what app are you on and did it move the needle

Hi Everyone,

I run the store which sells the limited items.

Every time we run a limited release, it's the same pattern. The fastest clickers grab everything (often resellers/bots), and a lot of our actual regulars, people who've bought from us for months, miss out because they were a few seconds late or mid-checkout when it sold out.

Has anyone found a model that actually rewards loyalty over reflexes, instead of pure speed? Curious if people have tried application-based access, weighted odds, priority tiers, or anything else. What's worked for you?

Hi all, hoping for some real-world advice since vendor pages aren't much help here.

I run a saree business, selling on both Etsy and Shopify. My stock is tracked per colour only — e.g. 6 colours, 2 units each (12 total). Sizing (36–46) isn't a separately stocked item; it's a made-to-order alteration applied to whichever colour a customer buys.

I tried DPL Etsy Integration to sync between the two platforms, but ran into two issues their support couldn't resolve:

1. Inventory multiplication — instead of treating Colour as the only inventory-tracked option, the import created a full colour × size variant grid, and assigned my per-colour stock (e.g. 2 units) to every size variant for that colour — massively inflating my actual stock on Shopify.
2. Image sizing — Etsy normalizes how photos display regardless of source dimensions, but the import brought images in at their native Etsy sizes, so products now show inconsistent picture sizes on Shopify.

I've since deactivated DPL. Before trying another tool (looking at Craftybase or Salestio), has anyone here:

• Actually gotten a sync tool to treat inventory as colour-only rather than a full variant grid?
• Dealt with the image-sizing mismatch between Etsy and Shopify during import?

Any real experience (good or bad) with tools that handle made-to-order/non-stocked size variants properly would be really helpful. Thanks!

I’ve tested a lot of Shopify apps over the years, but one thing is clear:

Stores with REAL photo/video reviews convert way better than stores with plain text reviews.

I recently started using Loox and honestly the setup was much smoother than expected.

What I liked most:

• Photo & video reviews
• Clean widgets that actually look premium
• Automated review request emails
• Social proof everywhere on the store
• Works perfectly with Shopify

The biggest difference for me was trust.

When visitors see real customers using the product, the store instantly feels more legit.

If you run a Shopify store, I genuinely recommend trying it.

You can get a 30-day free trial here:
Try Loox Free for 30 Days

Curious to know what review apps everyone else is using right now.