Heeey! What’s up?

Before starting this email, a quick reminder:

On May 27, we’re hosting The Wide Event, from 6:00 pm to 11:30 pm, in Paris, at “Le Salon Des Miroirs”.

It’s a special Shopify partners Event (in English) for the whole ecosystem.

Merchants and Shopify Agencies will be there, it’s a good way for you to find customers.

App Founders will be there, it’s a good way for you to find partners.

But it’s also great to network and get inspiration and motivation!

150 people are expected, so hopefully you’ll be one of them!

Get more details about the event by clicking on the image below 👇

In today’s email we’re going to talk about:

Let’s go!

Built For Shopify

WideBundle is now Built For Shopify! Finally! After a bit more than 2 months!

And you know what’s crazier?

We’re not using Shopify Polaris! 😳

Many people thought it was impossible. But since the beginning, Shopify always said that using Polaris was recommended, not mandatory.

It was recommended because they have design guidelines. These guidelines are already respected by Polaris. Which is why it made sense to use it.

But WideBundle never used it since the beginning.

You already know me, I hate doing things like everyone, haha!

I’m using vanilla PHP, I’m being transparent even with the numbers, and obviously, I don’t use Polaris!

Well… Before sharing with you the impact it had on my app, let me share with you why I decided to get BFS (and if you should get it too)

Why did I decide to get BFS?

Starting in December, we slowly lost ranks on some keywords.

Some keywords whose ranking hasn’t changed for years. So something was wrong.

I took a piece of paper, my brain, and some javascript and spent hours analyzing everything:

Number of reviews, velocity, change in ranking, etc…

I came to this conclusion: Even though BFS didn’t have a big impact in the first few months, it’s now obvious that it has changed.

Having BFS now has a big impact on your ranking.

When should you go for BFS?

When shouldn’t you go for BFS?

Getting started

The first step is to check a few points. Even before thinking about the design guidelines.

And the most complicated for people is the section “Build for performance”…

You’ll have to use the Lighthouse tab of Chrome to track these parameters and improve them.

Then you’ll have to wait 30 days because Shopify will use the average of these parameters.

Once it’s done, you’ll obviously have to get at least 50 installs and 5 reviews.

Design Guidelines

After doing the first phase, you’ll have to submit your app. Shopify will then carefully review everything from the features to the design.

Is it built on Shopify standards?

After reviewing it, they will give you feedback by email with all the points that you need to fix.

The first feedback took 2 weeks, and we had 21 points. Don’t get discouraged.

They will tell you everything you have to change, even if sometimes it’s hard to know what they want.

Feel free to ask in the Shopify App Founders community if you have a question regarding the feedback. The community will help you figure out what you need to do.

Make all the changes, and submit again.

And sometimes the feedback will take 2 hours to come (yes) and sometimes 2 weeks.

It can be pretty annoying and don’t assume the more time it takes, the better (or the contrary). I didn’t find any relation between the time and the feedback.

You also don’t know when they will give you the feedback, you just have to be patient.

In the end, you’ll receive an email saying that your app is now Built For Shopify!

What was the impact?

Let’s talk about numbers.

We increased our ranking overnight on multiple keywords. I was right, it has a big impact. Even if it doesn’t do everything.

For example, I was ranked 18th for a keyword and immediately jumped to 9th. And the same thing happened for some other keywords.

But most important it’s the number of installs.

I didn’t notice a big change in the installs. To be honest, I don’t see any difference.

This is probably because the App Store isn’t our only acquisition channel, and not our main one.

So if you improve this channel, it won’t increase significantly.

But I went deeper and actually compared with App Store Analytics all the installs I received.

I checked all the keywords typed, the categories used to find my app, and created a javascript function to do something simple:

Rank all the installs by category, keyword, etc…

And I noticed this:

Before BFS, out of all my installs, the installs for the keywords counted for 10%.

After BFS, the same keywords counted for 14%.

That’s a 4% increase. It’s not that much, but let’s say you have 1000 installs per month; that’s 40 more installs.

The conversion rate on the listing didn’t change that much, so I guess we didn’t need it to increase trust from merchants.

Getting that badge was probably worth it in the long term, but definitely not in the short term.

You have to switch from Rest to GraphQL

Shopify made a huge announce: They’re deprecating Product and Variants API on Rest.

Starting in June 2024 for some people, then in 2025 for every merchant, the Product and Variants API on Rest won’t work anymore.

This is because they had to make a lot of changes to welcome the new 2,000 variants and the 3+ options.

And keeping both Rest and GraphQL was too much work.

For us, and for many other people, it means changing the app (again) to meet the new system.

→ A lot of research and development (to understand what needs to be changed)

→ A lot of coding (to make the changes)

→ A lot of testing (to ensure it works as before)

It’s annoying but there is nothing else we can do.

If you’re changing it, you better change everything to GraphQL as well, because in the future, some other parts won’t work since they want to keep GraphQL only.

The Shopify Editions event

1 month ago I shared with you that Shopify in-person events were back.

I just booked my ticket to the event that will take place in Toronto on June 25.

Hundreds of partners will be there! Maybe thousands? I don’t even know!

If you didn’t have the chance to get a ticket yet, don’t worry you’ll have time to do it in May!

It’s great because I’m hosting an event in Paris on May 27, then 1 month later I’ll meet you again in Toronto!

If you didn’t grab your ticket for The Wide Event, you can do it by clicking here

Thank you for reading that far! Don’t forget the Wide Event!

And see you in the next email!

Mat 😁