What are the advantages of having a “Built for Shopify” 💎 badge for your app?
It has been around two months since two of our apps got the Built for Shopify 💎 badge. I am getting a lot of questions about BFS from Shopify app developers. Mainly, questions are about tips on how to get BFS and also about how it affected our installs. Getting a BFS badge is not easy; it requires a lot of hard work, and I can understand people wanting to know if this effort will be worth it. I also shared some tips on what to pay attention to get the badge.
Ok, I will start by giving you some technical background so you can compare it to your situation.
Technical background of our app
Our main app, Smart Bulk Image Upload, has been in production for around 3.5 years. It hasn’t been an embedded app. The backend and frontend were written in Laravel (PHP).
The first rule of programming, If it works don’t touch it
All programmers know the quote, “If it works, don’t touch it.” In our case, this app had been in production for 3+ years and was very stable. So we didn’t want to touch the code, but a lot of stuff needed upgrades, and instead of modifying the existing project, I found it easier to start from scratch. It was also an opportunity to rewrite some parts with our new know-how. I also didn’t want to touch the code too much in the past because it was a side project and I didn’t have enough time. But this time situation was different I was about to quit my full-time job.
Quitting a full-time job to work 100% on Shopify app development
When I first started working on this project, it was a side project in which I was working evenings and weekends, and time was always limited. I was dreaming for a long time to start working full time on my projects, and independent from this project, I quit my full-time job and had a ton of time to start working on this kind of big rewrite project.
Rewriting project from scratch
We used Laravel for the backend; this is where I feel super comfortable. On the frontend, I decided to use React, which is a new technology for me. I have wanted to learn it for a long time. My main motivation was to be able to use the Polaris component library, which I really like. Before using React on production for our main app, I worked with a friend on a smaller project and learned React from him, and I was ready to start working on a main project.
It took exactly 2 months from the full rewrite to the BFS badge 💎
I just realized it took exactly 2 months. Dec 12 the first commit, and on Feb 12, we got the badge 🎉 You can maybe also include my React learning phase additionally, which would make it 3 months project.
It might sound like a short timeframe for some devs, but I want to add that I was working super intensely during this timeframe (evenings, weekends), and I was able to copy-paste a lot of backend logic. So, the main challenging part was writing UI / UX. On Feb 7 we made our application for BFS and it took 5 days to get the badge. Because the app was built from scratch with BFS in mind, I was expecting very little feedback, but we got around 12 points to fix. Most of them were easy, but some of them were a bit complex because they required changing names. But I was able to fix all these points in one day and reapply. Then, we got the badge 5 days after our application. Shopify review team is super fast and explains issues nicely with screenshots or screencasts, and I am very happy and can’t complain about this part.
In my second app application, the reviewer went on holiday (my guess) for 2 weeks, and it took a bit longer, but in general, if you are lucky, the whole process should take shorter.
The most common things to pay attention
- Read all design guidelines carefully. This is not mandatory, but to make your life easier, use the Polaris component library for UI.
- Pay attention, especially to how you show errors. Don’t use critical (red) toast messages for errors.
- Avoid using informational (blue, green, yellow) banners, but if you have to use then make sure you make them skippable.
- If you are doing some validation, show them inline, and when the user starts typing, hide the validation error.
- You can have a different name for your app, which is visible in the backend (admin panel) and on the App Store. In our example, they wanted to make our name in Admin shorter. So our name in Admin is Smart Image Upload, while in the app store, our name is “CS—Smart Bulk Image Upload.” You should have a unique name for your app, in our case CS, which is the short name of our company, Craftshift, which is doing that work.
- Don’t put any unnecessary buttons in the in-page actions section. We had a support button on all pages, but they asked us to put only things related to the page and move the support button to the left menu.
Expectations vs. Reality
Ok, after giving all the context, now we are in the main part of this post.
There are official posts about Bult for Shopify badge benefits, but they are not super clear and do not mention many important small details. So, sometimes, expectations might be different from reality.
I will divide this part into sub-sections.
Moving up in the App Store Search ranking?
The main expectation was to move up in the Shopify app store search for our main keywords. But surprisingly this didn’t happen. We were monitoring our main keyword rankings with SASI which is a great tool for Shopify app ranking tracking. After getting BFS for the next 2 days, we were expecting an email with a lot of green numbers, but nothing happened. We were very disappointed about it. So it seems like there is other more important stuff that is affecting your position when merchants are searching for specific keywords, and these are factors like having a keyword as an exact match in some parts of your listing, your reviews, etc. But BFS, in our experience, has no effect here. Maybe it can change in the future, but at the moment, it has no effect.
I am actively monitoring what other devs are sharing about the Built for Shopify badge effect on their keyword rankings, and I just noticed Mat de Sousa shared the following numbers. This means that it can help with your ranking in different situations.
Moving up in the categories?
Yes, this one happened! 🚀 Both of my BFS apps moved to the first page for our main category, bulk editor apps. But the bad news is that this is not a very popular category that is getting a lot of traffic. Merchants need to click multiple links to come to this page, so unfortunately, in our case, this wasn’t a game-changer. But if your app is in the popular category and you are getting a good amount of installs from category pages, you can move the needle.
We got only 4 installs in the last 90 days from our category pages, so I would say it is not really worth it.
Being suggested more by Shopify support
We noticed the Shopify support team started recommending us more to merchants after getting the BFS badge. I think they are more confident about recommending apps with the BFS badge. I don’t have this data backed by some data, but this is what we heard from some merchants who come to us by recommendation from support, and the rest is my gut feeling.
Merchants trust your app more
First of all, I think a lot of merchants have no idea what is Built for Shopify. But for some merchants, if they understand it, it increases trust in your app, so they have less fear it will break something on their store or will make some weird things. Reviews are still more important here, but BFS again adds some trust component. But again, with this one, I can’t back my assumptions in a data-driven approach, but it is more like a gut feeling. I think it is still very new, and trust in BFS apps will increase even more in the future. We just need some time here.
I was expecting “Wow!” from our customers
I was thinking that making UI/UX much better would have a wow effect on our customers, and we would get a lot of compliments, but we went live, and you know what happened? “Nothing” absolutely nothing. No one ever commented on any of our UI/UX improvements. I asked some people about what they thought, and they said, “Ahh, yes, it works as expected.” So, unfortunately, the main thing about your app remains solving the problem. It doesn’t really matter how nice your app UI is; our app was already solving the problem, and now it is solving it with a nicer, maybe a bit faster UI, but in the end, all merchants care about is to have their problem solved. They really don’t care if your UI is built with old school PHP or shiny react Polaris 😅 Whatever technology you use, just make it clean and easy UX, with minimal decisions to make, with minimal text to read, and you are good to go because nowadays people also do not read much.
Increase in Google ranking
Since your app is now part of the. Built for Shopify collection, which is linked nicely to main page and a lot of pages. It means you are getting very valuable internal back-links on the Shopify App Store to your app listing page, and this helped us to rank higher in Google. We are now ranking high for our main keywords on Google, for which we were even doing Google Ads in the past before Shopify made changes to their TOS to prevent using the “Shopify” keyword in the ads. I think this is really nice benefit.
Being put in the spotlight
Our other app was put in the spotlight. I am not 100% sure if it is directly related to being a BFS app, but I guess it might help with this kind of surprise benefit. I guess they are more confident about putting some BFS apps in the spotlight. But again, this is not guaranteed, and our main app didn’t get this benefit.
Another benefit is respect from other Shopify app developers
Ok this one is not something that directly will bring you more installs but other developers definitely understand it is not easy to get BFS, they know you struggled and was able to beat the big boss LCP which is still continue scaring me. They know you built top-notch UI/UX and you get a lot of respect in the community. Maybe the indirect effect can be that some agency developers might recommend you to their clients. This is actually can be the biggest advantage because we know a lot of apps are being installed by consultants, so again, something I can’t say confidently in a data-driven approach, but my gut feeling says it is very important.
Downside of Built for Shopify
Next to a lot of nice advantages, unfortunately, the BFS badge is something you can lose at any time. I just this week received an email that our LCP average is going up, and if we don’t lower it, we will lose our badge. I also often see stories on Twitter where people lose their badges because of some mistakes, so it definitely adds some stress to losing the badge in your life. Additionally, you have to do everything in a BFS-friendly way, and this also makes you lose some flexibility.
Conclusion
I am 100% happy that I got the BFS badge. The whole process actually helped me learn more about building professional UI / UX, and I think from now on, I can apply these principles to my other projects as well. I have a new skill in my skill belt. I was expecting to move higher in search rankings, but it didn’t happen, which is sad. However, I think Shopify will make changes to the search ranking algorithm in the future. This is my bet. I am super proud of the top-quality product we built, and getting recognition from Shopify about it makes it even better. I would say if you are struggling with some basic problems like bringing paid customers, getting reviews, solving real problems, or marketing your project, BFS is not going to magically solve any of these problems. But if you already nailed the basics and you need an extra push and seeking a daily dose of LCP stress, then go for it! Good luck and thank you for reading 🙏
You can follow my journey on Twitter to hear more insights like this.
