BSSA #74 - The new problem of the Shopify App Store 🚀

Hey you! How are you doing? 😁

I’m doing well, this week we:

• Reached $1,000,000 in total earnings for a single Shopify App

• Reached $52,000 MRR (about to reach $53,000)

So I’m pretty excited! Q4 is incredible this year.

All right, we’ll talk about many things in today’s email:

1) What about a Shopify App Course?
2) I’m flying to Sofia Bulgaria for an event and you can meet me
3) I attended a Shopify Event in Paris
4) I recorded a 7-min video about growing on the Shopify App Store when you’re just starting
5) The new problem with the Shopify App Store

You’re ready? Let’s go!

1) What about a Shopify App Course?

This question has been here for months (maybe years?).

And thus for multiple reasons:

• Some people asked me to build a course to learn from me.

• I receive the same questions many times and this is a way to say it once.

• It would create another income source.

But we have some downsides:

• I’m indirectly creating more competition for me

• It takes time to create

So if I do it, it needs to be worth it.

I have a question for you:

What If I added everything I know inside a course to help you get your first users or help you grow. Would you take it?

It means the processes I follow to handle every part of the business. It means how I analyze my data and make decisions. And how I get more and more users every month.

It wouldn’t be a technical course, but a marketing one (where I can also share how to work with developers or how to do marketing as a developer)

For all the people who would take it, one important question:

2) I’m flying to Sofia Bulgaria for an event and you can meet me

I’ve been invited by Ruslan to speak at the Sofia Ecom Meetup.

You can join it here:

I will share how I grew my Shopify Apps to $50,000 MRR!

3) I attended a Shopify Event in Paris

Last week, someone from the French community hosted the “ShopiShopaShow”.

100+ attendees with 10 French Shopify Apps (including myself) showing their apps.

The attendees were merchants or agencies (and the agencies work with many brands)

These events are a great way to create relationships with potential customers. And these customers can pay a lot as they’re usually big brands.

And here is the process I follow to find such events:

1. Follow as many people in the ecosystem as possible (the more people you follow, the more aware you’ll become)

2. Notice the people who organized or attended events in the past

3. Review every day these people to know if there is an event soon

There are events everywhere in the world, the goal is just to be aware of them.

4) I recorded a 7-min video about growing on the Shopify App Store when you’re just starting

And this video is still in private.

But I wanted to let you know! I’ll soon create a YouTube channel and start posting video content. I’ll also have short content on Reels.

You can already follow me on Instagram if you don’t want to miss them: https://instagram.com/mat.ds

5) The new problem with the Shopify App Store

Last week, Shopify released something new on the Shopify App Store: Auto-translation.

When someone from Spain was looking at the Shopify App Store, he would see the app listings in English.

The only way to see the listings in Spanish was if the app owner actually created the listing in Spanish.

But now it’s different, every listing is translated automatically to Spanish.

This could be a great feature, right? But I noticed a few problems:

1- The translations are very bad. So what’s better? A good English listing or a bad translated listing?

2- We lost 15+ positions for our translated listings.

The first point doesn’t matter, everyone will have a different opinion. But the second point is important, so listen carefully:

I translated my listing to French, Spanish, German, and Italian.

I lost 15+ positions for my best keywords on each of these listings. 😱

So I started to analyze (you already know me).

And I noticed many other apps also lost many positions for these locales.

So I kept analyzing and noticed something even more weird:

I lost positions ONLY on the listings that I had translated. So for example, for the Portuguese listing, I didn’t lose positions.

I checked other apps, and same thing! They lost positions only for the translated listings.

And what’s crazy is that I compared 3 apps:

They were all translated into French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

For all these languages, the 3 apps lost 15+ positions.

But the third app also translated the listing into Portuguese… And guess what?

They lost 15+ positions for the Portuguese listing while the 2 other apps that didn’t have the listing in Portuguese, didn’t lose anything.

That was the first part: Analyzing.

Now comes the second part: Assumptions.

What is the natural assumption here? → That a translated listing has less impact than an automatic one.

Which is really weird right?? But it is the assumption.

How can an automatic translation rank higher than a manual one? Especially when the translation isn’t right.

And now the third part: Validation

And read carefully…

I removed the Spanish listing (that was translated by a native)…

And I automatically went back to the top of the page! 😳

But then we had another assumption: Perhaps this is just that the automatic listing has better keywords, even though the listing doesn’t mean anything.

So what did I do?

I copied the exact listing that was automatically translated and created a manual translation with that.

Guess what happened?

I went back to the bottom of the page.

Now I didn’t exactly copy the text. Because it wasn’t possible.

You know we have a character limit on the listings, right? Well, the automatic translation isn’t impacted by that, so the auto-translated listings will always have MORE words than the manually translated listings.

So perhaps that’s the problem?

The only thing is:

You'll have a better ranking if you remove your manually translated listing. 😱

I already talked about it to Shopify and they’re looking into it.

But if they don’t find any problem. What are we going to do?

Should we remove our manually translated listing to get a better ranking even if the translation will be worse?

No one is winning there. The Shopify App founders who created a translated listing aren’t rewarded, so they remove it. And the merchants now have poorly translated listings since the App founders removed the translated listings.

We’re waiting for more details from Shopify! 🕦

That’s it for today’s email!

I hope you enjoyed it! Feel free to share my newsletter with someone else: https://news.matdesousa.com/

And let me know what you want me to discuss in the next email!

See you next week,

Mat 😁