Are Shopify Apps a Good Acquisition Target?

June 03, 2025

by a searcher in San Diego, CA, USA

While we can all appreciate the positives of SaaS businesses (recurring revenue, no customer concentration, etc), I’d like to hear from experts about the threats to this space. Specifically, what is keeping Shopify from replacing popular apps with native functionalities? In the future, will merchants be able to build ad-hoc capabilities through AI without having to write code or use Shopify apps? How will developers keep their apps relevant in the future?

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Reply by a searcher
from University of Nottingham in Cirencester, UK

I'd typically say be very wary about the future stickiness of a product's revenue built on someone else's platform. You're entire business model is reliant on a third party. And if, for whatever reason, that platform falls out of favour with the market and its customers, so does your revenue stream. But Shopify have such a dominant market position I really wouldn't class this as a meaningful risk. I think a more interesting and probably less documented risk is how AI is going to change the interface to e-commerce store front ends. At the moment, organic and paid media drive users to virtual shop fronts. The future is still being defined here, but imagine one where the interface to those stores becomes a chat interface via ChatGPT or equivalent and customer acquisition starts looking very different. Shopify is likely still the back-end serving product information, pricing and the customer-facing side of fulfilment, but the ecosystem of applications around that starts looking quite different. I'd say post sale fulfilment shaped applications are fine as potential acquisition targets, but pre-purchase would personally make me very nervous. OpenAI are starting to look more at this with recent hires including Instacart's Fidji Simo https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-talks-hire-senior-executive-major-leadership-role-information-reports###-###-#### /

Reply by a professional
in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India

The risk isn’t just Shopify replacing you. It’s 3 things: 1. Shopify eating your lunch (yep) 2. AI + better defaults killing edge-case demand 3. Being a “vitamin” not a “painkiller” The stuff that survives? It’s deeply entangled in the merchant’s stack. Things that power revenue, ops, or retention in a way Shopify won’t touch (usually stuff too niche, too support-heavy, or not “core” to their LTV metrics). So when you’re looking at apps… Don’t just check churn and MRR. Ask: Does this app solve a problem so painful the store owner would notice if it vanished tomorrow? If the answer’s yes, you’re good. If it’s a nice-to-have with 27 competitors and a weak moat, skip it.

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