Everyone says "just build a Shopify app." Cool — build what? We scanned all 44 Shopify App Store categories, the top 870+ apps' pricing and badges, and mined 2,500 merchant reviews, then ranked every category by competition, price and merchant pain. Here's where it's actually worth building — and where you'd be walking into a saturated race to the bottom.
⚡ Scan your own app idea free →
The Shopify App Store is not uniformly saturated. It's a barbell. A handful of categories — reviews, SEO, social proof — are brutally crowded, with the top three apps owning 70–78% of the market. But right next to them sit categories where the top three hold under 30%, merchants are actively complaining, and there's no Shopify first-party app competing. Those are the openings.
Ranked by how little the top-three apps control (lower concentration = more room to win). All figures are from the live App Store plus our review mining.
| # | Category | Top-3 hold | Median price | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wholesale / B2B | ~29% | $24/mo | GREEN |
| 2 | Upsell & bundles | ~29% | $19/mo | GREEN |
| 3 | Multichannel inventory sync | ~30% | $19.99/mo | GREEN |
| 4 | Design elements | ~31% | $12/mo | GREEN |
| 5 | Gifts | ~32% | $15/mo | GREEN |
| 6 | Pricing | ~33% | $15/mo | GREEN |
| 7 | Currency & translation | ~33% | $19/mo | GREEN |
| 8 | Checkout | ~35% | $29/mo | GREEN |
| 9 | Analytics | ~38% | $25/mo | AMBER |
| 10 | Customer loyalty | ~39% | $34/mo | AMBER |
Customer loyalty apps carry the highest median price of any large category (~$34/month), a huge, sticky, recurring market where merchants are already trained to pay monthly, and — critically — no Shopify first-party rival. It's slightly more contested than the pure-open categories, which is exactly why it pays more. If you want recurring, defensible revenue rather than a one-off, this is the sweet spot.
Inventory sync is the least-concentrated serious category on the board. Merchants are furious about overselling — items showing in stock after they've sold out across channels. A real 1-star from our mining:
"lists items that are sold out, causing oversells."
Every complaint like that is a feature spec. Fix the oversell problem cleanly and you're entering a market the incumbents are actively handing away.
These categories look obvious precisely because everyone builds in them — which is why the top three already own most of the market. Enter only with a genuinely novel angle.
| Category | Top-3 hold | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Social trust / proof | ~78% | RED |
| SEO | ~70% | RED |
| Product reviews | ~70% | RED |
| Advertising | ~67% | RED |
| Dropshipping | ~64% | RED |
Recurring app revenue is one of the more realistic "build once, earn monthly" paths in ecommerce — but only if you pick a category where merchants already pay and competition is thin. That's the whole point of ranking by concentration and price: a $34/month loyalty app with 1,000 paying merchants is ~$34,000/month in illustrative recurring revenue; the same effort in a saturated category fights for scraps. Pick the niche with the data, not the hunch.
Type your Shopify app idea and the radar rates it red / amber / green against this exact data — competition, price and merchant pain — then shows what it'd take to push it green.
⚡ Scan my idea free →We pulled the public Shopify App Store — every browseable category, the top apps by review count, their pricing tiers and badges (including whether Shopify ships a first-party app in the category) — and separately mined 2,500 of the newest merchant reviews across the lowest-rated categories, tagging each for manual workarounds, missing features, support failures and pricing complaints. Concentration is the share of top-20 reviews held by the top three apps. Illustrative revenue assumes 1,000 paying merchants at the category's median price; real results vary with execution and retention. The dataset refreshes on a weekly cycle.