Top 100 Plus App Report!

TLDR:

March Madness has sprung
The Top 100 Plus App
Tool: Organizing through the Chaos.

March Madness is in Full Swing

I finally got out of the house yesterday to do what the kids these days call “touch grass” and met up with some friends. It was great to watch a couple of games and catch up with friends. The bars were packed with people there to hangout, get out of their apartments and watch some cinderalla stories.

It’s always fascinating to see something (college basketball) that most people don’t care about through most of the year completely captivate the public’s attention for a short window. We’ve got a full agenda today so not going to dive into the potential marketing insights here. The 1 thing I’ll say is it’s all a game of attention.

🙏🙏🙏 to the 941 ride or dies reading this. Now what everyone’s been waiting for. The Top 100 Shopify Plus App Report.

THE Shopify Plus Tech Top 100 Report

If you just want to dive in here’s the [Link to the Report]. Please reply to this email with any feedback, requests for further analysis.

Everyone’s loves talking about tech stacks.

I’ve spent my entire career working closely with Shopify Apps. I started out building Magento Connections and Shopify Apps. Then went to manage a couple of Shopify Plus brands overseeing the tech stack and now work for one, Gorgias.

After the Cambrian explosion of apps in the Shopify space over the last 4 years, there are now 7k+ Shopify Apps for a brand to choose from. It’s never been nosier for brands to pick the right App, and more competitive for an App to get themselves in front of the right brands.

In all my different roles I’ve always noticed a consistent problem emerge between the brands and the apps. And it’s a complicated but crucial 2 sided issue.

1. Brands get too wrapped up in buying when they see the big logo on the homepage/case study, because they have little context into the scale of the app. Who’s using the tool and how.

2. Technologies puff up their chest, and numbers, as much as possible to appear as trustworthy as possible. They’re trying to catch them all and don’t always understand how the relative size of all the players are in their space and who’s using their competitors’ tool.

The goal of this analysis and what we’re building at Shopnewsandreview.com is to bring more visibility for both Brands and Vendors into who is using what tools and how to better identify the right technology for your brand. Plus it’s fun to see out of the 24,788 Shopify Plus stores how many are using each tool.

In the Report you’ll be able to view:

• The Top 100 Apps by number of Installs and % of total Shopify Plus stores.

• A breakdown of the major players in each category (email, Reviews, Returns, etc) with greater commentary on how the market is shaking out.

• Insights and takeaways that will change your mindset on the App landscape.

Some sample takeaways:

• Did you know only 10% of Plus stores use a Return provider? 90% of Plus stores are manually processing their Returns.

• Or that email is the most dominant category with 82% of total market Penetration with Klaviyo occupying 59% of the total market.

• Or that the second most installed Plus App (Hotjar) has 25% market share. Less than half of Klaviyo’s dominant position.

There are plenty more interesting insights like this in the report!

Tool that Needs to be on your radar

Keeping things organized with Monday.com.

For those of you who don’t know I’m an absolute productivity nerd and the backbone of how I can get so much done (Run partner marketing at Gorgias, Invest in startups, Post daily on Linkedin, run this newsletter, etc.) is because I always work out of a great project management tool.

It’s not only a place to track and store everything you’re working on, it’s the key to reducing your mental load. As soon as I get requests, assets, updates on a project they go in a Project Management tool like Monday so I don’t have to remember all these details. The project ticket takes care of all of that for me.

We had 3 tickets with 20+ subtasks to build this report. We tracked our progress across data cleaning, analysis, the write up and promoting it. Would we be able to get it done without one. Sure. But I also would have pulled my hair out a lot faster also.

Some more interesting insights from the Report:

• No one category is 100% penetrated across all of the providers. There’s still so much growth left for the Apps.

• Outside of Email, there’s no category that’s owned by 1 player with 50%+ Market share.

• Capturing 5% of Plus stores puts an app in the Top 50 Plus apps. Capturing 15% puts an app in the Top 5.

• Despite Back in Stock being a standard feature in most ESPs 3.4k brands still use a stand-alone app for it.

• Google sunsetting Optimize (18% Plus adoption) presents a huge opportunity for someone to step in with an affordable option.

• BNPL (Klarna + Afterpay) and Support (Zendesk + Gorgias) are the only categories with 2 players in the Top 10.

• Yotpo’s acquisition strategy has them as the category leader (#1) in Reviews + Loyalty and the #2-3 player in the SMS space.

There’s significantly more insights to gleam from the report itself, but the biggest takeaway from me is how much room for growth the apps in the Plus space still have.

No category has 100% market share already claimed. Email at 82% penetration, with Klaviyo absolutely dominating at 59% market share and Mailchimp still clinging on to 11% still has 18% up for grabs. Quick math: that represents 4.4k+ stores still not using of the major email providers.

What does this mean to me? Despite all the mega-fundraising in the Shopify SaaS space and what feels like more competitors in every category than it can support. We still have a ton of growth for these companies to evolve to better support Shopify Plus Brands.

🧠 The Takeaway

 One line summary

1. There are hundreds of Plus vendors, but few of them own much market share. There’s still plenty of room to grow.

2. There are 10-11 core areas of eCommerce. 2 of them have dominant players in the space.

3. New Plus apps are shooting off the starting line to gain adoption quickly.

👷 What can you do about this?

1. More research into new vendors you are looking to bring on. You can leave reviews on any App vendor here.

2. Don’t get sucked into the logo trap when buying new tools.

3. If you’re a builder there are so many opportunities to build in the space.

As always. Stay confident, connect with your customers, and keep crushing it.

Jeremy Horowitz

P.S. If you’d like to learn more check out some of our other resources:

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2. To find out more about what we are working on 🏃 Shop News and Reviews

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