📜 Documentation
A record of the process of building a Shopify app from scratch. Numbered to be read in order.
| File | What it's for | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 00-SHOPIFY-101.md | The Shopify ecosystem, what an app is, how the money flows. Start here. | ~30 min |
| 01-ECOMMERCE-GLOSSARY.md | AOV, CAC, LTV, ROAS, churn… with formulas and worked examples | ~20 min |
| 02-SHOPIFY-ANATOMY.md | Depth: why Shopify, its position worldwide, industries, community, the architecture behind it and API rules | ~45 min |
| 03-ECOSYSTEM-DATA.md | The economics of the market: revenue distribution, price bands, churn, discovery, gap analysis — read before picking an idea | ~30 min |
| 04-SOURCES-AND-EARLY-WARNING.md | Where do I learn about new/beta features, where does the ecosystem feed from, how do I know in advance if Shopify is going to swallow my category | ~30 min |
| 05-PEOPLE-AND-VISION.md | Who Shopify's leadership is and what they're saying; people and companies with a proven name in the ecosystem; the strategic message | ~25 min |
| 06-MERCHANT-PSYCHOLOGY.md | Merchant segments, how much they pay at each level, why they install and why they uninstall, which tools they actually use | ~35 min |
| 07-SHOPIFY-EVENTS.md | Shopify-only events: DotDev, Editions, Connect, partner meetups, app vendor events + sources to follow | ~20 min |
| 08-ECOMMERCE-EVENTS.md | General e-commerce/DTC conferences (Turkey, the Balkans, EU, US), price wall analysis, open CFPs + calendar sources | ~25 min |
| 09-PODCASTS.md | Shopify/DTC/indie-SaaS podcasts — latest episode dates verified, dead ones marked + discovery tools | ~20 min |
| 10-CASE-STUDIES.md | Reading Shopify case studies through a money lens: the value pool, the slice an app can take, the number the merchant will pay | ~25 min |
| 11-BRAND-AND-SCALE.md | Branding and scaling: Ali Aslan's funnel/email steps + Gürkanzone's "premium price is a result" sequence: pain-point funnels, offer, proof, email/SMS flows, the founder's face; 2020+ brand use cases and people to model — for both stores and apps | ~45 min |
| 12-PROBLEM-SELECTION.md | The painkiller workshop: pick the niche, mine competitor reviews for real pains, interview, and write the one-sentence problem. Run before building anything in Phase 5 | ~25 min |
| 13-APP-ORIGIN-STORIES.md | The apps merchants actually have installed: what each founder saw, what v1 did, how the first 100 customers arrived, and where it got to; plus six 2020+ app use cases (Zipchat, Wide Bundles, WideReview, Kaching, Selleasy, Trustoo) | ~40 min |
| LEARNING.md | Roadmap + session-by-session learning log | ongoing |
Reading order: 00 → 01 → 02 → then hands on the keyboard with Session 2 in LEARNING. Phase 5 (idea/problem selection) has its own arc, and the order matters — it builds an argument: 03 (the market's economics) → 06 (who pays and how much) → 10 (where merchants already pay) → 13 (how winning apps found their one problem) → 12 (the workshop where you do it) → 05 (who to follow while you do). Don't start at 12; it assumes 03 and 06. Read 04 before publishing your first app (set up the RSS feeds, run the early-warning system). 05 is the answer to "who should I listen to" — no rush, but high return.
⚠️ Data-reading rule: Shopify doesn't open up the inside of the App Store. Most of the third-party numbers here are measured by storefront scanning; admin-only apps are structurally invisible. Every penetration figure is a floor value. The same metric can vary up to 3x from source to source — contradictions are explicitly marked in every file. 00 builds the mental model, 02 fills in what's underneath it; don't mix the two — keep 00 short.
Notes that mature turn into blog posts under content/posts/ and are published at
shopifyjourney.cemalbuilds.com.