Not long ago, I could be heard singing the praises of Shopify’s “Shop App” which allowed you to shop select stores, see deals, use “Shop Cash”, in addition to tracking your orders. The order tracking and history was always the magic, since the Shop Payment platform is very ubiquitous across the web you never really had to manually add tracking to monitor your packages — instead, moments after hitting order on a site, you get a little notification about the order on the app. Then it would update with tracking and deliveries as they came.
This was rather brilliant. Here you had an app which I would otherwise avoid like the plague, but which I was now incentivized to go in and look at and where I wanted the notifications turned on. It’s a marketers dream.
They had me. Shop app had me.
Yes, there was always issues. Shop apparently changed design teams every other release and constantly moved around UI. It’s clearly web views so the infinite scrolling gets janky fast. And the tracking never updated as quickly as one hoped — but all in all the upside greatly outweighed the downsides and the friction was pretty low.
That was at the peak at least.
However, for the last ten months or so, updating the app meant that you got a progressively worse experience each time. The features I used the most were buried deeper. Finding tracking, archiving orders, or even interacting with your current orders were shoved in out of the way spots, to promote things I cared little for.
Everything being promoted to me wasn’t the stuff I normally bought, now was it from brands I bought from often — rather from brands which looked more like they were repurposing AliExpress items. They looked cheap.
Here we are with a mountain of data about exactly what I buy, how often, my spend — all of that at your fingertips, and I see nothing relevant. Baffling.
Yet, while annoying, it wasn’t bad enough that I would leave. But the upside of the app was leveling out with the downsides of the app. I hung on as the app made order history and tracking exceedingly easy.
Then came the recent Shop Week promotions. Every time I opened the app to check my order status, I was greeted with a full screen splash ad for the upcoming Shop Week. I couldn’t act on it, mind you, nor could I dismiss it. I simply had to sit there and stare at it for a bit before I could go about my business.
About a dozen times into this nonsense is when I realized: downsides outweigh the upsides, Shop’s lost the plot.
I deleted Shop app, because of their own bullshit and no other reason.
This is how an app I really liked, which really made my life easier, became an app that I could not stand keeping on my iPhone. And I even have the Amazon app on my iPhone which looks horrid, but at least with Amazon everything I see is relevant, and I can always get where I need quick enough.
I am writing this as a warning to all companies: this is what happens when you let the marketing and sales teams take over decisions on software products. The designers and product people should be in charge, not the salespeople. Shop seemingly moved from product people overseeing a great little app, to a focus on monetizing every aspect they could — no matter the annoyance to the user. There’s no way around this being the only explanation.
I don’t know how effective any of those changes were for Shop across the board, but I do know that their greedy app design changes mean I won’t install the app again, nor would I consider their platform should I need one in the future. The last thing I would want is for my customers to be forced to use a platform which sees fit to self promote and show literal junk, over anything useful.
What a damn shame.