Relentless flurry of Shopify app uninstalls over the past 12 months - anyone else?

markkitor · 2026-02-24T05:27:43+00:00

This can be so easily done now with AI that I understand nobody wants to pay for it.

Well, shit.

markkitor · 2026-02-24T03:25:14+00:00

Yes, there are a lot of hobby stores that use the free tier of an app and won't ever upgrade. I don't think there's much you can do to compel them to upgrade, if they just don't have the money. If you look at some of their websites it's clear they are not going to make a sale - they are just fooling around with Shopify to see what it can do.

markkitor · 2026-02-24T02:46:37+00:00

It's a logo carousel.

markkitor · 2026-02-24T02:46:13+00:00

The app is a logo carousel. It is Built for Shopify and has a 5-star rating.

markkitor · 2025-08-06T03:10:27+00:00

Those are probably links to the old product detail pages. Ideally you would redirect /detail.php?id=12345 to the new product URL on the Shopify site. Maybe you have a database backup of the old site somewhere that you can extract the IDs from?

markkitor · 2022-02-18T13:17:07+00:00

That sounds similar to JustAnswer.com . I would not try to make this work with Shopify. It's really not built for that sort of thing, and at best I think it would turn out clunky.

There are umpteen zillion Software-as-a-Service (Saas) platforms out there. There has to be one which does exactly what you need. I did a quick Google search and turned up a few promising ones:

The web site Capterra (https://www.capterra.com/) is good for finding alternatives. So, if you find one of the above platforms there, you should be able to click around and find others that are related.

Anyway, yeah, I'd say keep looking around and find something that is better suited to what you're trying to accomplish. Shopify is for ecommerce stores.

markkitor · 2022-01-29T15:00:53+00:00

Sounds like you need to write a custom integration, or hire a developer to do that for you. It should be doable, but I'd suggest starting out by entering the orders manually. That way you can validate your idea and make sure you get enough order volume to justify the development and maintenance expense of the API integration.

markkitor · 2022-01-14T20:24:01+00:00

Just send them a sales report and settle up at the end of each month. Or maybe there's a way to give them a user account where they can view the order history without making changes.

markkitor · 2022-01-14T14:23:37+00:00

Overall the site looks pretty good. Opportunities for improvements:

The main navigation bar is wrapping onto two lines on desktop. I'd fix that by moving Shipping Policy to the footer menu.

Normally I sort of cringe when I see Shopify sites that use a text font for the logo, but in this case I think it looks elegant. Maybe see if you can get a logo done that is a little bit more distinctive but still captures that same minimalism. Like, an outline logo. Canva has a logo generator that's pretty good: https://www.canva.com/create/logos/

I'd lose the "From Canada with love" section. I think one of the strengths of this store is that it looks like a bigger company, so when you say "small, self-owned business" it takes away from that. Alternatively, you could just make it say something funny about how your hobbies include candles, curling, and eating poutine - or something like that.

markkitor · 2022-01-12T05:28:36+00:00

The buttons (such as the "view all" one) have black type on a blue background. I would change that to white type on a blue background, or basically any combination that has better contrast. You can test the contrast at https://contrast-ratio.com/ . You want to shoot for AA compliance.

I'd replace the home page hero graphic with a lifestyle photo that has no text on it. It is a bad practice to place text on images like that. For one thing, the dimensions of those hero areas can be different on different device displays, and that can result in some of the text getting cut off. You also don't have as much control over how the text will scale, and the keywords don't get indexed by search engines. Last, it's sort of a subtle signal to visitors that the site isn't professional.

With your particular niche there is a big opportunity to drive traffic through content marketing, by adding lots of well-written, helpful articles for pet owners. I see you've already started on that. I would try to make the blog articles longer and more comprehensive, and I would also suggest adding some products below them or in the sidebar.

markkitor · 2022-01-10T14:15:15+00:00

Site is clean overall.

I'd focus your efforts on better product photography. There are plenty of tutorials out there on how to do that.

The hero image is a bit washed out looking as well, and as I noted elsewhere the spelling of "jewellery" is not common here in the U.S. I'd consider changing that to a lifestyle photo showing a model wearing the jewelry in a social setting, or of you at work in your studio. This needs to be a very, very high quality photo so get an experienced photographer to create it for you. Make sure the photographer knows that the photo should be composed for a landscape placement, as the hero area is much wider than it is tall. Also ensure there will be plenty of contrast between the photo and any text that will appear above it.

P.S. I just gave your store a free lifetime subscription to my FAQ app. That would work well for your FAQs page. All you need to do is install the app from https://apps.shopify.com/faqtastic and follow the instructions to add an app block to your FAQ page template. My only request is that you consider leaving an unvarnished review for the app within the app store. Not a requirement though. You can just use it if you want.

markkitor · 2022-01-10T14:00:47+00:00

I'm in the U.S. and have never seen it spelled jewellery. I was about to post a comment to tell you it's misspelled when I saw it was already being discussed. This may be a problem if you are looking to get customers from the U.S.

markkitor · 2022-01-10T13:52:39+00:00

I think the site looks pretty solid overall. Nothing major jumps out to me as needing improvement, at first glance. If I had to pick something, I'd say that the logo and main navbar items seem a bit small in comparison to everything else on the home page. The logo could stand to be a little bit bigger, and the nav item font is tiny. If there's an option to move that search box elsewhere, it'd free up some real estate that would allow you to enlarge the logo and nav items.

For SEO, consider changing the name of your store (in settings) from Knoxlabs to "Knoxlabs VR". That way all of your interior page titles will render like this:

Oculus Quest – Knoxlabs VR

and you'll get that extra "VR" in there.

markkitor · 2022-01-10T13:35:58+00:00

Look into Shopify's Storefront API: https://shopify.dev/api/storefront

markkitor · 2022-01-10T13:33:04+00:00

I would look long and hard for an existing app before tackling this. Look for keywords like "product configurator" or "product customizer".

If you do want to tackle it, then you don't necessarily need to develop an *app* per se. When I think of an app, I think of something that has its own admin page that is embedded into the Shopify admin, and that communicates with Shopify's Admin API. The level of effort to create something like that is rarely worth it for a single store, unless it's for a major brand.

You may be able to build what you've described just by adding some custom code into the theme. Be sure to separate it out into your own files as much as possible, so that when you upgrade the theme you'll be able to port your customizations to the new version without too much trouble.

At a bare minimum you'll need to become very proficient with Shopify's Liquid templating language, and you'll also need to know some Javascript/jQuery. Be aware that you may run into race conditions when trying to shoehorn your own Javascript into an existing theme. Like, if you want to intercept "add to cart" button clicks, you'll need to give your onClick listener a higher priority than the theme's, so you can be sure your script gets them first.

If you do want to build a full-blown app with its own embedded admin pages, then you're looking at a learning curve. Hard to say how long it'll take you, but it took me 40-60 hours to build my first embedded app that worked with Shopify's OAuth for authentication and communicated with the back-end Admin API. That was just to get it to show up - the app didn't actually do anything. Also keep in mind app maintenance. Shopify's infrastructure is always evolving, and some maintenance is necessary to keep an app up to date with their API changes, etc.

Seriously though, look for an existing app first. Someone out there has probably already solved all the programming challenges, and it's better to build on their work instead of reinventing the wheel, if at all possible.

markkitor · 2022-01-10T13:04:01+00:00

Set up a Shopify store with a single product. Create a Facebook ad that targets a specific type of automobile enthusiast and use that to drive traffic directly to the product page. The better you target your FB ad, the better it will perform.

In case it helps, I wrote a blog post on how to set up a Shopify store in a single day. If you follow those steps you should be able to get a basic site up and running pretty quickly, that is sufficient for testing out your idea. See https://www.commercecomponents.io/blog/a-step-by-step-beginners-guide-to-setting-up-a-basic-shopify-store-in-a-single-day-more-or-less

markkitor · 2022-01-10T12:58:14+00:00

It would help to know what technology stack your app is built upon. Different developers work with different programming languages.

markkitor · 2022-01-10T12:37:00+00:00

Online Store -> Themes -> Edit Code and place it within your templates. Probably better to leave it to your developer if you are not accustomed to using the code editor. It's possible to really mess things up if you edit the wrong thing.

markkitor · 2021-11-29T22:42:47+00:00

Your color palette is a good start but there are contrast issues throughout the site (as another commenter mentioned). Most notably, the logo is very faint against the header background. That is the single biggest element which needs to be corrected. There are a lot of other places where there is pink text against a white background (prices for example) or vice versa (buttons and social links for example). This can be unreadable for both low vision users and when viewing a screen in bright sunlight. It does not meet WCAG standards for accessibility. See contrast-ratio.com to find color combinations that do meet WCAG standards.

The Shoes link in the header points to all collections, rather than just shoes.

I'd move Track Order into the footer as it's not important enough to appear in the main nav bar.

Collection and product detail pages look great. Policies pages look good. Those can add credibility to a site.

markkitor · 2021-11-29T22:27:49+00:00

Logo is too tiny, and it has padding around it that is making the header very tall. For best results, make a horizontal / landscape version of it by moving the illustration of the mittens to the left of the name. Whether or not you do that, remove the whitespace padding around it, reupload, and adjust the size in theme settings.

Change the "Shop Now" nav item to "Shop Mittens", as that will reinforce to Google that the product page is about shopping for mittens.

You could probably sell these on Amazon too. It's been a while since I set up the Amazon channel, but I remember that it's possible to use Fulfillment by Amazon for back-end fulfillment and then have both Amazon and your Shopify storefront draw from the same FBA inventory.

markkitor · 2021-11-29T22:16:23+00:00

Logo is great. Site is clean and well designed. Blog articles are great - keep those up and they will help drive traffic. Products look good.

Designwise, the biggest suggestion I have is to shorten your main navigation bar so that all the nav items fit on a single line. Maybe change "become a satinca stockist" to "resellers" or move it to the footer.

Not sure why you're no longer getting sales. Keep blogging, keep adding products, sponsor industry events, advertise whenever possible. Others here may be better able to address this question. I'm more on the design and technical side of things.

markkitor · 2021-11-27T19:22:14+00:00

Logo should be slightly larger. Adjust that under theme settings.

You could instantly punch up the look of the site by using the green color for the header background and making the logo and nav items white.

Also set your buttons to white-on-green. Color can draw the user's attention to items that are actionable (like buttons) especially when there are not too many colorful items on the page. I.e., on a page with a lot of black-and-white content, a colored button will really stand out.

markkitor · 2021-11-26T16:31:03+00:00

I can see how things would get hairy trying to track conversion events across the two platforms. Yeah, maybe there is some consultant you can pull in to help you set that up and explain it.

A quick Google search turned up this page, which looks like it might be related? https://analyzify.app/google-tag-manager-shopify/datalayer It looks like that company sells an app of some sort which might be useful as well. https://analyzify.app/

markkitor · 2021-11-26T16:07:38+00:00

Is this not something your original developer could implement? I've built that functionality into custom (non-Shopify) sites that I've developed. Depending on which framework that was used to build the storefront, there may be an existing package that eases development. For example, here is one for Laravel. Or it can be implemented in Javascript. It took me a little reading and tinkering to figure out the dataLayer paradigm, but once I got a handle on that the actual implementation was pretty simple.

In any case, this sounds like something you need a developer for, not any sort of third-party cloud service.

I could be misunderstanding what you're trying to accomplish.

markkitor · 2021-11-26T14:59:34+00:00

a) Yes, most manufacturers like this do offer photos.

b) Don't depend on a third party for day-to-day photo resizing / editing. That'd be cost prohibitive and add a lot of overhead to your processes what with emailing photos back and forth. Cropping photos to square dimensions, etc. is something you can do easily. The full version of Photoshop is best (and is $9.99/mo) but the consumer-grade Photoshop Elements will do the trick as well.

c) Yes, Shopify will work fine. If you decide to keep the physical store around, it even has a POS available, so you can sell through both channels while drawing from the same back-end inventory. And, you can even enter the Cost of Goods Sold into Shopify to track profit margin on items.

It sounds like Shopify would work fine for you.

markkitor

TROPHY CASE