Bonus Episode: Shifting from Reviews to Smarter CRO Tools with Jeremy Horowitz

Jeremy Horowitz

45% of stores don't have reviews at all. They don't have a tool. They don't have reviews on their site. They're not using anything to power reviews.  

Chase Clymer

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Chase Clymer

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming to show a pretty known figure in space. You've been around for quite a while in this direct-to-consumer Ecommerce world. Jeremy Horowitz, how are you doing today? 

Jeremy Horowitz

I'm doing great, Chase. Thanks for having me.

Chase Clymer

I'm excited. Quickly, for those that  your name doesn't ring out for, give us the crash course. What have been up to the last 10 years? 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah. So in my decade plus in the Ecommerce space, I started by building Magento Connections, then worked at an agency where we migrated WooCommerce sites over to Shopify, back when there were about 250,000 sites. From there, spent 6-7 years on the brand side managing high growth Shopify plus brands, most notably Lumi. In there, we scaled through from six to eight figures. Also, we're for an automotive aftermarket business called Car Park Kings, six to eight figures as well. Did that for a long time, then spent the past five years on the SaaS side. 

So I worked at a bunch of high growth Shopify apps. And about a year ago, I left Gorgias to full time start a private equity company where we acquire both Shopify brands and Shopify apps.  And at times, we're analyzing the market, doing a lot of deep research where we started this annual top 100 Shopify app report, which I'm sure we'll dive into today. And yeah, today I spent my time between acquiring and the private equity firm and then operating the portfolio companies that we've acquired. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And so he buried the lead there. But what we're talking about today is Jeremy put in quite some time here. And so he ran through various data sources, which I'll let him outline the method behind the madness. But basically, the top 100 Shopify apps in the ecosystem that are being utilized by brands above that million dollar threshold, which I think is a unique distinction. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah, we actually started doing this a couple years ago, said, okay, what are all the apps that the Shopify Plus brands are using? And what are the most common? The really interesting thing that we found is that there are two really interesting insights. One, Shopify Plus brands aren't actually as big as you probably think they are. The average revenue per year for a Shopify Plus brand is $2 million.

And you have billion dollar brands in that data set. So most of them are actually in that 500,000 to two and a half million dollar range. The other super interesting insight we had was that there are just as many brands doing about one to 10 million off of Shopify plus still on Shopify, like on a regular plan. Then there are no pluses. So when we looked, when we really wanted to look at what's the complete data set of where these larger brands on Shopify are using, we really wanted to expand it out to anyone who's doing an estimated a million dollars in GMB.

Couple really interesting key highlights, like I think they're really important to start with. There are over 3 million stores that are now powered on Shopify across the entire ecosystem, which is just insane to think about.  And then the second part is, there's about 103,000 stores that are doing around a million and up. And so that's 3% of the total Shopify audience is in that million dollar mark and up.

So then what we did is we have a bunch of data sources. We can basically see what people are installing into the front end of their website. We crawled all those data sources to then find, who are the apps that are most common among that tech stack, coordinated into the top 100, which I know we'll dive into a little bit more specifics, and then broke it out by categories, you know, email and SMS, support, reviews, data and analytics, kind of all those major categories that everybody uses and on their stores. There's some really interesting trends and I think some big surprises as to what those big brands on Shopify are actually using. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And then just here at the top, I want to tell the listeners and it's going to be linked in the show notes. All of this is on an awesome Notion document  that's not gated. You can go and play around with it. And it's got  a lot of additional  insights and clarity behind just how this kind of data set got cleaned and sourced. Get rid of some of the things that have multiple domains because they got a European website and an Australian website, etc. 

Make sure it was only active ones. Make sure it's just the dot com. So there's a lot of extra information and extra stuff on this Notion document. But we're going to try to give you the crash course in 15 to 20 minutes here. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah. I'll leave some of the good stuff so that they can read the report. 

Chase Clymer

Alrighty. So I guess, what is the number two most installed app? Let's not go with number one. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah. Everyone probably knows that it's Klaviyo as the most installed app. They're in a pretty dominant position. I think what was a surprise to most people is Judge.me is actually the second most installed app in the Shopify ecosystem. 

Chase Clymer

It doesn't surprise me because we were one of the first Judge.me partners when they launched their partner ecosystem this year. 

Jeremy Horowitz

That's awesome. 

Chase Clymer

And I know that for a fact. It's also a great product and it's hard to argue the value. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah. $15 a month is pretty hard to argue. What I think is what's most impressive and like a standout for me is how fast Judge.me is growing. JudgeMe is actually installing, year over year has more installs than Klaviyo does. And why that's impressive is that Klaviyo is a billion dollar public company. They have 150,000 total stores that work with their entire customer base, all platforms, all sizes. Judge.me is basically like a 10 million ARR.

Just Shop, well, they have other platforms as well, but really focused on Shopify. And essentially the 7,700 stores that they installed in the 1 million range is adding 50% of the total base that they started the year before with. So basically they grew by 50%, which, now, Clever grew by 7,000 installs as well, but off of 40, you know, 39, 40,000 installs. So it's a much more doable increase.

They're really big. I think what actually probably the biggest surprise in the whole report is Mailchimp is still the third most installed app at 18,000 stores. I think everybody, every year we bring it up is like, it's got to be old code. It's got to be dead. But they even grew by almost 2,000 installs last year. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. And we're going to be very nice guys. We're not going to say anything bad about any of these apps. If you want our personal opinions, we'll do it off record. But on this, we're just going to talk about the ones that are installed and not make anything that might bite us in the butt later.

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah. Every time we bring it up, everyone's so surprised because I think Klaviyo has such a strong brand in this space. But I think Mailchimp is also good.

Chase Clymer

I think that just legacy brands, if it's not broken, don't fix it. So that Mailchimp number doesn't surprise me. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah.  And I think that's a big insight is that there's actually a lot of these mega, so-called SaaS brands that  aren't built for Shopify, and aren't necessarily focused on space. But we still see this incredible install base around.

And a really strong presence. Mailchimp, Zendesk, ShareASale, Microsoft Clarity weren't even in. We've done this report for 3 years. This is our third year in a row. Microsoft Clarity wasn't even in the first report. Now they're number 5 more than once in the whole ecosystem. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Let's go through the top 10 real quick just because we're looking at it to give some people a smile. So it's Klaviyo's number 1. JudgeMe number 2. Mailchimp number 3. InstaFeed, which is a visualization that brings in your Instagram feed to your Shopify store at number 4. Microsoft Clarity at number 5. PushOwl, which is now Brevo, they're owned by the same company at number 6. Afterpay at number 7. Hotjar at number 8. At number 9, Infinite Product Options. At number 10, PageFly. That surprises me. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah. And you were basically at the top. To be in the top 10, you had to have over almost $11,000 installs and up. I think the other big insight for me was, I always assumed the site extensions and all the other apps that plug the Shopify roadmap were going to be  things that just kind of went away and not really like key features. 

But InstaFeed, Infinite Product Options, PageFly have these massive adoptions. And I think there's still this great  use case to be had of a not that expensive, not that loud app, but it does one thing really, really well. It solves my use case. A lot of brands still use it and still love it. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. 

Jeremy Horowitz

And so I think those are really interesting. There's still a little bit of that not hacking together, but plugging together a bunch of individual tools that when we got started was very, very popular. And I think it's still happening and still a pretty popular strategy that works for a lot of brands. 

Chase Clymer

I'm going to probably say this all day. If it's not broken, don't fix it. Is it worth your time to rebuild something that already works or focus on your next product, your next winning marketing campaign, etc. That's a lot because as founders, you don't have that luxury to have unlimited bandwidth. So it's like, what should you be focusing on? 

And replacing outdated technology or whatever, not calling any of these out specifically. But is that the best use of your time? Sometimes you could argue, no. It works now. Let's just focus on selling more products. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah. Exactly, right. And advertising, like how do we just get more traffic and more people to the site? I think what was the other biggest surprise or standout that I think most people don't really appreciate until they think about it for a minute is email and SMS. I kind of lumped them into one major category. Now that basically everybody offers both has 84% market adoption. basically 84% of this segment, you know, the 103,000 stores have some sort of email or SMS tool.

The really interesting thing is that the second closest category is reviews at 55%. And so while there's a lot of noise in the review space and two out of the top three players, Judge.me and Yapo, are both very heavily installed and have very big adoption, 45% of stores don't have reviews at all. They don't have a tool. They don't have reviews on their site. 

They're not using anything to power reviews, which I thought was really interesting because

it used to be like you have to have reviews. You install Shopify, you install an email platform, you install a reviews platform. And now it seems like we're moving away from that. It seems like brands are not really using reviews as much and they're looking for other CRO tactics to convert and build trust with their audience. 

Chase Clymer

Well, I think that some of this, like the email, SMS and reviews, and some of these other broad stroke categories that you created to highlight the specific categories and how they grew in particular. It goes back to when we're recording this about a month before Shopify Editions 2025.  

But at Shopify Editions 2024, Toby spoke something that I brought up a few times, which is what they want to do. They want the Shopify core product to do most things for most merchants. Which is such a good clarification, I use it in educating people about the Shopify product all the time. 

And it's just like, Shopify will probably never take over email SMS just because it is just its own monster, its own beast, and it's not what their core product does. While it does offer Shopify email, it's just the most basic thing in the world. If you want more functionality out of it that's more unique to your brand, that's why these other things exist. Same thing with reviews. Shopify reviews, the one that just is native to the ecosystem, native to Shopify, their homegrown app, as you will.

It's one of the first things we see brands replace as they start to move up market. So some of these  categories aren't necessarily core to the Ecommerce experience to sell a widget to somebody online. But they do make it better if you're building a business. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah, definitely. And one qualification for the report is we took out any native Shopify apps. We don't consider the native Shopify apps as part of the route, part of the analysis. But I think what's interesting is that we're still at a million dollar a year mark. So I would say it's still fairly scale and still half of them don't use these, you know some of these tools, which actually the rest of the tools, because everybody's lower than reviews. What really the category as a category, once it really broke out this year that we actually didn't even have as a category in previous years reports is the, and what I'm just bucketing is kind of analytics and data. 

So there's things like heat mapping tools, server side tracking tools, things that basically I kind of bucket is like we need data back from what we lost in iOS 14 still and all the tools and tech stack around it. You know a lot of these players either weren't on the list or weren't that high up on the list. We started doing this year or two when we started looking at this year or two ago. You  know Microsoft clarity went from not on the list to number five Hotjar actually fell in the farthest. They were number two in the first iteration of this list. Now they're number eight.

Triple Whale, I actually remember talking to the founders when they launched that in 2020. Now it's the 19th most installed app. You have LLR in the top 50. What I find the most interesting about this category is actually there's all this analytics to look at what's going on in the site and understanding user data. VWO is at 100, barely making the list at all. And it's the only A-B testing tool in the entire report. A-B testing is not a popular practice, it's not a widely commonly adopted tool and tech stack in this. Considering 15% of stores use Microsoft Clarity, if we bundle it with all the other key mapping tools, it's almost 25%. 

Chase Clymer

I wonder what that would look like. Did you guys do this report when Google Optimize was still  around? Or did it happen afterwards?  

Jeremy Horowitz

No, Google Optimize was at the top, think 30 or 40 in the first year of the report. And it was actually even still fairly highly ranked when last year after it was on sale. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, because what I've noticed is merchants don't know what fills that spot for merchants now that Google Optimize is gone. Which Google Optimize was free. And it was awesome because it was free. You deal with the quirks of it. But now it doesn't exist and there's a bunch of other solutions out there that we like and recommend. 

But also, they are of various price points and investment levels and whom it makes sense for. Some of them just went way enterprise with their pricing structures and how they wanted to do it, which may be why we haven't seen someone really  penetrate this list very well.

I know outside of this list and just what I see from the LinkedIn ecosystem and atmospheres, there are some players in the space and it's super fun to watch them talk shit about each other's product.  

Jeremy Horowitz

Yes, it's definitely a space that's heating up. My guess is over the next 5 years. I don't know that anyone would necessarily replace Google Optimize, but I do think you'll see a bunch of players start to emerge and maybe a little bit more even upmarket than 1 million, probably not like 5-10 million and up space. 

Chase Clymer

Well, I'll just tell you right now. I tell brands. So if you want to get a statistically significant result on a split test, you're trying to increase your conversion rate, that comes down to how many conversions or sales you're getting. And it comes down to how your average order value affects how rapidly you're going to hit these things based on your conversion blah, blah. 

Just like a non-scientific number is like, it's around $5 million a year when you can start to hit a science. You can start to hit Statsig on a test in about a week. That's when everyone can do their job efficiently.  Below that, it gets a lot harder to do real CRO. And so I could see why that's affecting where things are on this list. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah, definitely. Although I've looked at the 10 million segment and there aren't very many players there either. So my guess is that will be the space to watch next as brands. The  Facebook magic money machine is definitely dying down and brands are definitely trying to put as much data back in there. I think the past 3 or 4 years have been defined by that.

I think the next 3-4 years will be defined by how we get back to that zero fundamentals, really relying on a channel mix and all those different players rather than just pushing as much Facebook traffic through our site as possible. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. What else was surprising about this list? Obviously, there's so much more than what we're talking about here. We're barely scratching the surface, everybody. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah. So now we talked about the big categories. I think let's flip to the other side. One of the personal biggest surprises and shocks for me, especially coming out of spending so much time working at Gorgias, is that only 21% of the segment has a support tool at all. Like 80% of brands in the segment just don't use a tool for customer support. Now for the 21 that do is an absolute very, very tight two-horse race between Gorgias and Zendesk. Zendesk has a little bit more installs. Gorgias is growing faster. And it seems like every year we do this report, the same place is a little bit bigger, Gorgias is growing faster, there should be a convergence point somewhere. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Zendesk had quite a few years head start. But Gorgias came in very  niche to Shopify. Oh, exclusive to Shopify, actually. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah. I would say Gorgias took the same playbook as Gorgias and Zendesk. They're modeling that very closely off of Klaviyo and Mailchimp. There's the big legacy SaaS that everybody uses and then we want to be the very Shopify focused version of the same tool set and problem. But  yeah, I was just surprised by how many people currently do not use a customer support tool.  

Chase Clymer

Are they just managing it in their inbox? That sounds crazy. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah, I think it is. But also if you go back to the same math you were doing for CRO. If you think about a million, $2 million a year brand, how many orders are they really getting a month? And then you can kind of proxy out how many tips they get by how many orders. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. And you know what? Not only just with customer support, but that's a conversation. Because beyond the agency side, you have a million ideas. And anytime you bring up a good idea to your clients, they're like, we want to do that. But then you're like, okay, let's talk about these nuts and bolts. Returns, kind of in the same wheelhouse as customer support. 

At a million dollars a year, yeah, they're selling enough products that it's paying for a couple of people's livelihoods, whatever. But to make it worthwhile to pay for some of these return solutions, you need not only 500, you need beyond 500 sales a month, you need 500 returns initiated a month to make this make sense. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Right. 

Chase Clymer

Which would argue a lot bigger than a million dollar a year brand. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah. I mean, if you just think about the high returning returns and we can talk about returns next. I have some crazy conspiracy theories about what I think is going to happen like the world's least prescription returns market. But if you think about returns to hit 500 returns a month, even in a big return category, like 30% fashion apparel, shoe footwear, you have to be doing 1500 to 2000 orders a month. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. And at a $75 AOV, that's a $5-10 million brand. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Right. Yeah. And you can build a quick math up of why returns…

Chase Clymer

That math was really wrong, by the way. 

Jeremy Horowitz

We were close. I'm not saying we're directionally right. Not literally. Yeah. Returns are a 3% market as well. Like 97% of brands in this segment don't have a returns platform. And I think it's probably the same thing. They probably are just routing it through their help desk. Probably most of the emails they get are return processes. They probably have a simple form that handles the information that it does. 

But yeah, I think one of the things I always hope to accomplish with this report, I feel like there's a lot of information and noise and you kind of assume that everybody is doing it this way. When really most brands, they have a very core tech stack. And then as they get bigger, they layer on all of these other  layers of, you know, more sophistication. 

So I think for my spiciest take coming out of all this report is loyalty is a 14% market with really three to four key players being Smile, Yapo, Growave, which I think most people probably haven't heard of and then LoyaltyLion. 

Subscription is basically just recharged. Like subscription only nine, I think this to me, this is like one of the biggest myths in the space is like everybody uses a subscription program and it's great for your commerce brand. 91% of brands don't use a subscription tool and don't have a subscription offer. And I think if you, I think if we map this out over the next five years, I think loyalty and subscription are going to consolidate into one category and it's going to look nothing like it does today. And here are the two reasons why. One, they're just so low adoption that yes, if you get really big brands on it, it can work from the SaaS perspective. You're going to see all of those people want to grow more. They're both basically just trying to solve the same problem. Loyalty is a usually points and discount based model to get people to come back and buy more subscription is a discount based model to get people to come back and buy more, more on a habit essentially. And the reason why I think these two things are consolidated is personally, I think subscriptions don't make sense for 99.9% of the Ecom brands. I just think their business model does not fit.

I need something on a recurring every monthly basis. And loyalty, I think the biggest miss that the entire Shopify ecosystem had with loyalty is we went, okay, loyalty is a tried and true retail tactic. So it has to work for Ecommerce brands. 

But if you think about all the best loyalty programs, they're retailers of other people's products, right? Amazon Prime is a great loyalty program. mostly sell a lot of their own products, but they mostly sell other people's products. Your grocery store sells other people's products.

Sephora, Nordstrom, like all of these, like if you go down the list of the inspirational loyalty programs, they're not brands who are selling you more of what the brand makes. And so I think as brands start to figure out like, hey, my fashion apparel or most of my beauty cosmetics brands don't really make sense to have in a subscribe and save model, loyalty doesn't really drive the needle. I think we're actually gonna see these two things just fold into one category of just getting people back.

And don't know what that looks like yet. But my assumption is, it's going to be something that taps into both models, but it's not going to be what we think it is today. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. One of my interesting takeaways from this is looking through the site extensions category, a lot of this got its lunch eaten by OS 2.0. There's a lot of stuff in here that is if I was going to consult on a store and build a new site would be replaced  by native functionality  or some very straightforward code. Within this top 100, there's 50-something apps that I think are  on borrowed time. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Maybe. But to your point before, if it ain't broke.

Chase Clymer

That's until they talk to me, baby.

Jeremy Horowitz

Chase just got his list of  all of these clients he's going to get. But just like, hey, here are 10 apps that you can remove from one of us. 

Chase Clymer

Dude, you joke about that. But when we do diagnostics for people, one of the number one things we're doing is we're looking at their app stack and re-educating them on their choices.  And that alone saves people thousands of dollars a month in app fees. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah. And I do think it's such an interesting thing like when I was on the brand side, we were very much diehard like plugging an app for this and this and everything has to be a very point solution and very specific. And now everybody's like, I want one platform. I want one thing to do everything. I think we'll net out somewhere in the middle. Like, you know, some tools would be great for this. Some tools would be great for that. I think what was interesting to me, because  the site extensions is always a tough category because it's kind of just a candid, just a mix. 

Like we kind of just, now toss everything in a bowl because there aren't really too many clear  categories we can break it out to. But what really stood out to me first is a lot of this is like the data notices, GDPR, accessibility, cookie consent. Like those have become very, very popular and grew like crazy this year. A lot of it still is kind of plug and play, you know, we want the card extension. 

We want the form builder. We want that stuff that you could build, but it's easier probably just to plug in an app and wrap it around it. And then the third thing that surprised me the most was what we talked about before. It's just some of the old stuff that still is just super popular, that is the stuff that we don't consider to be crazy or new or people think about a lot. But clearly, it must still provide a lot of value because they're still growing pretty well. 

Chase Clymer

Oh man. One of these has insane year-over-year growth.

Jeremy Horowitz

Is that Checkout Blocks? 

Chase Clymer

Well, yeah. They're huge, but they're awesome. But no. UserWay, the website accessibility. And that's what's a typo. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yeah. Okay. So Checkout Blocks grew so much, Shopify actually just acquired them and made them a native feature. And there was another one that came out of nowhere and just became insanely popular. And then yeah, UserWay, this accessibility, the data consent, just like that. All of them. It was just a good category to be in and everyone grew a lot, which is super interesting. They probably have lower price points, so it's a little bit more attainable and it's becoming a mandatory thing for everyone to have. But yeah, all of those just become like a checkbox for everybody to have all the stuff that just appears at the bottom of everybody's site. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely, Jeremy. Now, we're going to link to this report in the show notes here. But where do you hang out on the internet? Where can people find more information about you and the brands that you're investing in? Do you have an email list where I can sign up to get the 2026 report when it comes out? 

Jeremy Horowitz

Yes. So the best place to follow me is LinkedIn. Jeremy Horowitz. H-O-R-O-W-I-T-Z. I post twice a day. Everything Ecom, Shopify related helpful. I break down a lot of the data in my posts on a weekly basis. I also run a newsletter called Let's Buy a Biz!, where yes, if you do want to sign up, it will be through my LinkedIn. You can get first access. Yeah, that's the best place to follow me across all this stuff and catch the updates for next year. 

Chase Clymer

Awesome. Jeremy, thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Jeremy Horowitz

Thanks for the time, Chase.  

Chase Clymer

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

You can subscribe to the newsletter at https://honestecommerce.com/ to get each episode delivered right to your inbox. 

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Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.

Until next time!