
“We had identified that partners could help us accelerate merchant growth, and were increasingly becoming helpful and important to our merchants.
Scratched a million off my checklist three years ago how to#
The app store’s app count hovered around 100 back then, and while that was a strong marketplace any company would be pleased with, the team wanted to figure out how to improve and grow. Three years later, Atlee joined the team with the goal of accelerating the growth of the app ecosystem. “Luckily, the team had already been thinking about that-partners saw an opportunity, Shopify saw an opportunity, and merchants loved it.” Is there a way I can build this once and sell it to people?’” Atlee recounts. “Those developers were actually the ones who came to us and said, ‘I'm doing the same thing over and over again. At times, they made the same modifications repeatedly for different clients looking to solve the same problem. Partners-or the designers, developers, and agencies that would soon form the foundations of the Shopify Partner Program-were already helping Shopify merchants in a variety of ways, including using Shopify APIs to modify their stores. That's why we always had an open platform and an open API,” Atlee explains. “From the beginning, Tobi (Lütke), Harley (Finkelstein), and the architects of Shopify really believed that a merchant owns their own store and should be able to do whatever they want with it. The very first iteration of the Shopify App Store landing page.Īpp & Partner Platform Director Atlee Clark explains that the original push to build an app store not only came from Shopify’s leadership at the time, but also from an organic pattern happening on the open platform. Launched in 2009, the first iteration of the Shopify App Store had less than a dozen apps, many of which ended in “-ify” to match Shopify’s name. Visit the new Shopify App Store, and see how it can get your app in front of the right merchants.
