From App Stores to Owned Demand

This marked a shift from marketplace led growth to brand led growth for ecommerce software. Early on, Shopify’s app store could surface a new tool to merchants at the moment they were looking for one. As the ecosystem grew into thousands of apps, ranking became more contested, paid placement became more important, and serious vendors increasingly had to win merchants before they ever searched inside Shopify.

• Alloy was selling into a market with extreme app sprawl. Sara Du described more than 20,000 ecommerce software tools across Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, and others. In a market that crowded, a directory stops being a clean discovery layer and starts acting more like a noisy index.
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• There is a clear before and after in Shopify app distribution. Earlier research on Postscript described the Shopify App Store as a strong growth channel with one click install dynamics. By 2022, Shopify was redesigning the app store, developers were reporting install drops, and Shopify itself was advising partners to improve discovery through SEO, reviews, and other channels.
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• That helps explain Alloy’s content strategy. Its product is not a single obvious app category like SMS or reviews. It is a workflow layer that connects tools like Gorgias, ReCharge, and custom internal logic. Merchants usually need education before they search for that product, so content on the ecommerce stack can create demand earlier than an app listing can.
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The next phase favors companies that control their own demand. The winners in ecommerce infrastructure will use app stores as a checkout point, not as their main top of funnel, and will invest more in content, partnerships, agencies, and product led loops that bring merchants in before a platform marketplace decides what gets seen.