ASR Weekly #25

"We do not have a specialist"

November 06, 2026

From the founder:

The October round-up is live, and the month had a bit of everything: Shopify's biggest release of the year, a checkout attack that started inside app code, and two deadlines app teams need in the calendar now.

But the thing that stayed with me came from our own data. We read all 59 buying-intent submissions from October in one sitting, and the same sentence kept appearing in different handwriting: there is nobody here to do this. More in the Pattern below.

If you advise more than one store, the referral programme is built for you. Details below - it pays per brand and there's no cap.

Like this newsletter? Forward this email to another brand operator or app developer!

Welcome to the brand network

These are a few brand operators that joined us this week:

Shreya J. – E-commerce Manager, United States · Health & Beauty · Plus plan

Paul S. – Owner, United States · Basic plan

Michael J. – Owner, Canada · Home & Office · Plus plan

Start a project to meet these participants and others like them.

Bring someone in

Most of the people in this newsletter run one store. Some of you run five, or advise a dozen.

If that's you - agency, consultant, fractional operator, freelancer - the referral programme was built for the way you actually work. It pays per brand, every time, with no cap and no deadline. One conversation with a client you're already on a call with is worth $100.

What it pays:

  • $100 — for every Shopify Plus brand you bring in

  • $50 — for every other Shopify brand

  • $50 — for every researcher or app team

Paid when they complete their first research session. Your clients get paid $100–$300 per call for the time, and they hear what app teams are building before it ships — which makes you the person who put them in the room.

Something you can paste straight into a client email:

Worth 30 minutes of your time: it's a research network where Shopify brands get paid $100–$300 to talk to app teams building tools for stores like yours. You see what's coming before it ships, and you get paid for the call. Here's my link: [your link]

Black Friday/Cyber Monday is here. Will your best sellers stay in stock?
Sales Call · Incentive: $250 · 30 mins - on demand forecasting through the Q4 peak, and what one stockout on a best seller actually costs

Phone sales and after-hours calls at Shopify brands
Research Call · Incentive: $100 · 30 mins - pre-purchase questions on higher-ticket products, sizing and fit, wholesale enquiries, abandoned-cart callbacks

Shopify Plus agency leaders: help shape a partner program for inventory forecasting
Research Call · Incentive: $150 · 30 mins - for retainer-based agencies working with Plus or 7–8 figure merchants

The attack came in through the apps

The October round-up is live. Three things worth your time:

  • The checkout attack started inside app code, not themes. From 10 October some shoppers were routed to lookalike checkout pages that captured card details and then passed them to the real checkout, so orders completed normally and nothing looked wrong. The malicious code was loaded at runtime from app vendors' servers through app settings - merchant themes were clean in every documented case. Shopify added redirect warnings on 20 October and narrowed them on 23 October. Go and test your own checkout in a private window and read the domain in the address bar. Then delete the apps you don't use.

  • Google AI Mode and Gemini checkout are on by default for eligible stores, rolling out to shoppers in the US, Canada and Australia. The part to know: Google Analytics and custom pixels won't record those orders, so your conversion rate is being calculated on an incomplete set of sessions. You can turn it off under Sales channels → Agentic.

  • Two deadlines, if you build apps. Public apps calling the Admin API must move to expiring offline tokens by 1 January 2027 - unmigrated apps are delisted and blocked from new installs that day. The standalone Knowledge Base app closes 15 January 2027, and apps with more than 1,000 facts were not migrated automatically.

Fall '26 landed on 28 October with 150+ updates, and the round-up covers the rest: Sidekick, Canvas, Shopify Protect, seven new local payment methods.

Pattern of the week

We read all 59 of October's buying-intent submissions together rather than week by week. Four things fell out:

  • AI & Automation was the most-named focus area - 31 of 59, narrowly ahead of SEO & AI Search and Email & Retention on 30 each.

  • 11 operators described running the whole thing themselves. "We do not have a specialist." "Just 2 full time employees - we manage all the operations, inventory & fulfillment, sales, marketing, SEO, & shopify ourselves." "As a founder who does it all." "I build a lot of our internal tooling myself."

  • 28 are actively replacing something they already pay for, and between them they named 112 apps. Most named more than one; three named eleven, seventeen and twenty-two.

  • 24 want to move inside 30 days. Only 4 are looking past two months.

Read separately, the first one looks like the AI story everybody is already writing. Read next to the second, it's something else. Nobody in this data is buying AI because it is clever. They are buying it because there is no second person.

If you're trying to work out whether you're behind on AI - you're asking the wrong question. Everyone else is just trying to get the week finished too.

Photo of the week

What started in 1993 as a playful tradition among four students at Nanjing University has grown into one of the world's biggest shopping events. In 2009, Alibaba turned 11 November into a shopping festival with just 27 participating merchants and around $7 million in sales. Ten years later, Singles' Day generated $38.4 billion in just 24 hours.

Today, the date is a major milestone in the global retail calendar, with platforms like TikTok Shop using it to kick off their Black Friday campaigns. The takeaway for brand owners? Don't just follow the promotional calendar - get creative, build anticipation and find new moments to give customers a reason to shop.

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See you next week.

Jon and team
— app store research

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