ASR Weekly #26

November 13, 2026

ASR Weekly

From the founder:

New piece this week: 1,679 operator reviews across 576 apps, sorted by which ones people say they could not do their job without. The headline number surprised me and it's below.

Separately, the intent submissions this week kept circling the same complaint, and it isn't one a new app fixes.

One line as always - if you know a Shopify brand that belongs in here, your referral link pays $100 for a Plus brand and $50 for everyone else.

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:

Natu M. — Marketing, United States · Health & Beauty · Plus plan

Ziggy M. — Owner · Grow plan

David L. — Owner · Advanced plan

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

BFCM prep: AI agents identify Google Shopping opportunities
Sales Call · Incentive: $350 · 30 mins - from a team of ex-Google Ads engineers who worked on Performance Max

Watch AI turn your products into UGC video
Research Call · Incentive: $100 · 30 mins - on shoppable content, abandoned carts and repeat purchases, plus feedback on a TikTok Shop tool

Seeking insights from leaders and operators at growing ecommerce brands
Research Call · Incentive: $200 · 30 mins - how sales tax obligations changed as the business grew, and what broke along the way

1,679 reviews on which apps are essential

New this week: the apps operators call critical, built from 1,679 verified operator reviews across 576 apps, January 2024 to October 2026.

  • Liking an app and needing it are different measurements, and they don't track together. Reviews and UGC apps are the best-liked category in the whole dataset at 79% very satisfied, and only 37% of those operators call them critical. Email and SMS runs the other way: 65% critical, 68% satisfied. Operators grumble loudest about the tools they can least afford to remove.

  • 55% of dissatisfied operators still have the app installed. Across every category, 91% of reviewers are still running whatever they reviewed. Being unhappy, on this evidence, does very little.

  • Triple Whale and Rebuy both showed as unavailable on the App Store on 10 November, the day the listings were checked. If either is in your stack, that's two minutes well spent today.

The per-app numbers are there too, and some rest on small samples - the piece says which ones.

If you run any of these, your review makes the next one better - add it from the App Stack tab in your account.

Pattern of the week

Ten submissions came in this week, five new and five updated. Half described the same problem in their own words:

"The current attribution models are not accurate, so it is difficult to trust the data."

"Getting clearer analytics on what's driving revenue."

"Platforms' different attribution models and the lack of 1P data available from marketplaces."

"Which marketing channels deliver the strongest return, so I can prioritize efforts more effectively."

Set that against the review data in this week's piece. Analytics and attribution apps score 76% very satisfied, third highest of twelve categories, and 90% of the operators who reviewed one are still running it. Nobody is saying their analytics app is bad.

Three weeks out from the heaviest spending fortnight of the year, half of this week's operators are about to allocate budget using figures they have told us they don't believe.

That is an expensive thing not to know in November.

New jobs this week

Hand-picked roles in ecommerce, app growth and digital retail - sourced daily from inside the network, no fluff, no expired listings.

  • Vice President Ecommerce — Tatum by Randstad · New York, NY · hybrid · $190–240K + bonus — view →

  • Senior Director of E-Commerce — Stoney Clover Lane · New York, NY · hybrid · $170–190K — view →

  • Sr. Ecommerce Operations Manager — Organics Ocean · remote, United States · $125–165K — view →

  • E-Commerce Director — Snap Supplements · Vancouver, WA · on-site · $120–155K — view →

  • Shopify Plus Expert / E-Commerce Website Manager — Naples Soap Company · Fort Myers, FL · hybrid · $95–115K — view →

  • Developer Support Expert — Shopify · United Kingdom · on-site — view →

Photo of the week

Shopify's first campaign with Mother LA went live this week: a two-minute film about four people who arrived at a business sideways. An office worker invents a way to stop birds hitting the glass. Two high schoolers design personalised pimple patches. A couple builds colourful sofas for dogs. A designer finds his next collection in a water stain on a sketch.

It is an ad, and it is selling Sidekick. Still worth the two minutes for what it gets right about where businesses start. None of those four ideas would survive a market-sizing exercise - too specific, too small, too odd - which is roughly what every good one looks like before it works.

Join our private communities

Join the ASR Brand Operator Slack

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Join the ASR Shopify App Slack

For Shopify app founders. Apply to join →

See you next week.

Jon and team
— app store research

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