Half of all reviews arrive within 17 days.
Every review on the Shopify App Store states how long the merchant had been using the app when they wrote it. The store doesn't rank by that field and doesn't publish it. Across the corpus it shows what the star ratings are really measuring.
- Written in the first day
- 27.7%
- Written in the first week
- 41.0%
- Median tenure at review
- 17 days
Well over a quarter of every review in the store is written by a merchant who has had the app for less than a day, so a large share of what the ratings measure is onboarding rather than the product.
Tenure at review
| Tenure | Share | Share, as a bar | Reviews | Avg rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| under a day | 27.7% | 204,966 | 4.85 | |
| 1-7 days | 13.3% | 97,919 | 4.85 | |
| 1-4 weeks | 14.8% | 109,212 | 4.82 | |
| 1-3 months | 10.5% | 77,511 | 4.82 | |
| 3-6 months | 11.5% | 85,241 | 4.80 | |
| 6-12 months | 6.9% | 51,308 | 4.78 | |
| 1-2 years | 8.2% | 60,686 | 4.74 | |
| over 2 years | 7.1% | 52,153 | 4.68 |
Read the rating column across apps, not as a timeline. The next section explains why.
Why ratings fall with tenure
The table above shows average rating falling as tenure rises, which invites the conclusion that merchants get more critical the longer they stay. Tested properly, that conclusion does not hold. Comparing first-day against year-plus reviews inside each app, across 360 apps with enough reviews at both ends, the gap is 0.043 stars (median 0.007), and only 52.8% of apps show it at all.
The store-wide slope is composition. Apps that collect reviews at install time carry slightly higher ratings than apps whose reviews arrive later: across 1,134 apps the correlation between an app's first-day review share and its rating is 0.16. Real, modest, and a different claim entirely.
Apps whose reviews arrive in the first hours
Apps with at least 50 reviews in the corpus. A high share here means the rating reflects the install experience more than months of use. It is not by itself a mark against the app.
Where the reviewing merchants are
- United States 271,678
- United Kingdom 67,017
- Australia 45,954
- Canada 39,971
- Germany 35,059
- India 30,461
- France 26,140
- Netherlands 18,285
- Italy 15,034
- Spain 13,591
Limits worth stating
Tenure is recorded at the review, not at churn, so a merchant who reviewed at one month and stayed three years appears here as one month. Every figure is a floor, never a duration, and none of it is a churn rate. Reviewers are a self-selecting minority: most merchants never write one. The corpus holds 82.7% of the store's reviews (738,996 with a readable tenure, 4,018 without), and the backfill takes the largest apps first, so it leans toward apps with many reviews.