How this works

Shopify's App Store shows a star rating and a review count. Both are easy to inflate: many apps ask for a review at the end of the onboarding chat, minutes after install, and those reviews are about the support rep, not the product a year later. This site reads the reviews instead of counting them.

What was read

Every review of every app in Shopify's shipping category, fetched in October 2026: 1,111 apps, 26,668 reviews, with the date, rating, country, how long the store had used the app, and the developer's reply. Apps with fewer than 30 reviews are listed but not judged. The numbers behind every app are in a CSV, one row per app.

How the opinions were written

For each of the 103 judged apps, all of its reviews were given in one pass to a large language model with a fixed set of questions: what the app is for, who it serves and fails, recurring failures with counts and whether they are rising or fading, red flags, how the developer responds, and whether the reviews look solicited. The model was required to cite review ids for every claim and to quote verbatim. A separate program then checked every citation: each id had to be a real review of that app and each quote had to appear in it word for word. Digests that failed were rerun. Across the 103 apps, 4,035 citations were checked and 0 failed.

The numbers on each page, such as review counts, negative share, momentum and the tenure strip, are computed directly from the reviews and were given to the model as facts, not produced by it.

The "under a day" count on the homepage

The homepage says 4 of the 103 judged apps get more than half of their five stars from stores that had used the app for less than a day. The rule, applied to every judged app and computed from the reviews each time the site is built: take the app's five-star reviews, and keep those that show how long the store had used the app (a review without that text is left out of both numbers). A store counts as under a day when its tenure reads in minutes or hours, such as "7 minutes" or "About 3 hours using the app"; "1 day" and longer do not. If more than 50% of the kept reviews are under a day, the app counts. Exactly half does not. An app with no five-star review that shows a tenure does not count. Four-star reviews are not part of this count. The share and the counts behind it for every judged app are in the five-star column of the all-apps table.

What "solicited" means

A review written within hours of install, during or right after a support chat, usually naming the rep. Such reviews are honest evidence that onboarding help is fast and real, and almost no evidence about whether the app keeps working. The coloured strip on every app shows how much of the positive praise came from stores with less than a day, days, months, or a year or more of use.

The CSV

The CSV has one row per app in the category, in the order of the all-apps table, and draws on three sources. As listed on the App Store: listing_rating and listing_reviews. Computed by the stats program on October 13, 2026: reviews_read, neg_reviews, neg_share (1–2★, all time), reviews_12m, neg_share_12m and reviews_per_month_12m (the last 12 months' reviews divided by 12). Counted from the review pull of October 25, 2026 when the site was built: the praise_tenure_ columns (four- and five-star reviews by how long the store had used the app; praise_tenure_known is their total), five_star_under_day and five_star_with_tenure (the rule above), and the dates of the red-flag reviews. From the written opinions: solicited, red_flags, red_flag_reviews (links to each cited review, dates in red_flag_review_dates in the same order) and evidence (thin, fair or solid). Every share is divided by a count from its own source. An empty cell means that source has no row for the app: apps with fewer than 30 reviews have no opinion, and a few apps have reviews in one pull and not the other. No review text is included. Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, credit pickashippingapp.com.

What this is not

It is not a ranking by stars, it takes no money from any app, and it does not test the apps. It is a reading of what merchants wrote. Reviews are gamed on every platform, so treat everything here as evidence to check against your own trial, and use the links to read the reviews yourself.

Corrections

Think a claim is wrong? Email corrections@pickashippingapp.com with the review id and what the review actually says.