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How Shogun Got to 1000 Positive Reviews in the Shopify App Store

14 August, 2018

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Shogun is a landing page builder app for Shopify. This week, Shogun crossed 1000 reviews in the Shopify App Store. Every single review at the time of writing is positive.

Screen shot of Shogun's Shopify Reviews from the Shopify App Store.

It took almost 3 years to get here, and it has been a lot of hard work. You might wonder how we have managed to keep our review record so clean. The secret is great customer service (more on that below). Here’s how our review count grew over time:

Area chart showing Shogun's cumulative reviews over time

Shogun Shopify Reviews over time

I was curious to know if other apps have managed to achieve a similar record in the Shopify App Store, so I scraped all of the reviews and ran some queries. It’s possible to see when each review was posted, along with the score, text, and some other metadata. This gives us a reviews table with these columns:

Column Name	Column Type
posted_at	datetime
score	integer
store_id	integer
app_id	integer
text	text

It turns out Shogun is the only app in Shopify’s history to reach 1000 reviews with no reviews less than 4 stars (SQL).

There are 2 other apps that made it to over 1000 with no reviews less than 3 stars (SQL).

PushOwl – Web Push Notifications: https://apps.shopify.com/pushowl
Free Shipping Bar by Hextom: https://apps.shopify.com/free-shipping-bar

There are 6 other apps that made it to over 500 reviews with no review less than 3 stars (SQL).

Currency Converter Plus: https://apps.shopify.com/currency-converter-plus
Yotpo Reviews, Photos, and Q&A: https://apps.shopify.com/yotpo-social-reviews
Sales Pop by Beeketing: https://apps.shopify.com/sales-pop
Wishlist Plus: https://apps.shopify.com/swym-relay
Cross-Sell: https://apps.shopify.com/cross-sell
Loyalty Points, VIP, Referral Programs by Smile.io: https://apps.shopify.com/smile-io

On average, apps with over 100 reviews and any review less than 3 stars pick up a bad review after 86.5 reviews (N=346, SQL).

Here’s how we did it

Beyond having a great product, here are the ways we’ve maximized our Shopify App Store reviews.

Have a great Customer Service strategy

I would be lying if I said we’ve never had bad reviews. We’ve had a few, and the trick is that we have reached out to every single customer who left us a negative review. When stores sign up for our app through Shopify, they become our customers and we gain access to their contact information.

When a customer leaves a bad review, we call them immediately. In many cases, they get a call less than a minute after leaving us a review. They’re usually surprised, sometimes apologetic, and other times annoyed. We listen and work with them to try and solve their issues. Here’s our step-by-step process for resolving negative review issues:

Call the customer immediately
Listen and don’t get defensive or ask them to change the review right away
If they don’t pick up, leave a message
Send a follow up email mentioning that you called them and will follow up again, or recapping your call and the items you will follow up on
Apologize, let them know their feedback is valued
Do whatever it takes to fix their problem
If you can’t resolve the issue, always offer a refund
Be persistent until resolution is reached

Control the quality of reviews

Our support team asks for reviews only if they sense that the customer is having a positive experience. We also utilize canned responses/snippets to increase efficiency here.

In email review campaigns, we always provide an outlet for a bad experience, by including language asking the customer to let us know if we’re not 5 stars for any reason.

We have a review widget in our app, and push any customer who leaves a 4 or 5 star review towards the App Store, and any reviews lower than this to customer support.

Generally speaking, we only ask for reviews from customers that have been using Shogun for some time. Some apps ask every customer for a review as part of their onboarding flows, and they end up with lower quality reviews.

And that’s all there is to it! If you want to experience our great customer service first hand, give us a try at https://apps.shopify.com/shogun. Here’s to the next 1k positive reviews!