10 Questions to Ask Merchants Before Building Your Shopify App
The biggest mistake developers make when talking to merchants isn't asking too few questions — it's asking questions that can only produce polite, useless answers. "Would you use an app that did X?" invites a yes that costs the merchant nothing and tells you nothing.
Good questions ask about the past, not the future. They dig into what merchants actually did, not what they imagine they'd do. Here are ten that consistently produce real signal.
Discovery questions
1. "What's the most annoying part of your weekly store routine?" Open-ended, past-tense, and about their life rather than your idea. Ask this before revealing anything about what you're building.
2. "Is there a spreadsheet you maintain outside Shopify? What's in it?" Every spreadsheet is an app that doesn't exist yet — or an app that exists but failed this merchant. Either answer is gold.
3. "What have you tried to solve with two or three different apps and still haven't solved?" This finds the problems that look solved from the App Store listing but aren't. Competing apps with poor retention are your opportunity.
4. "When did [the problem you're targeting] last actually happen? Walk me through what you did." If they can't remember a specific instance, the problem isn't frequent enough to pay for. Frequency beats intensity.
Money questions
5. "How much time or money does this cost you in a typical month?" A merchant who can't estimate the cost doesn't feel the cost. The strongest answers come with a number and an eye-roll.
6. "What's the most you've ever paid for a single app, and what made it worth it?" This calibrates their personal ceiling and tells you which value stories justify premium pricing in their head.
7. "Have you ever cancelled an app purely because of price?" The mirror image — where the ceiling actually is, not where they claim it is.
Trust and switching questions
8. "What's your biggest fear when installing a new app?" Theme breakage, site speed, data access, billing surprises — whichever they name first is what your onboarding has to defuse first.
9. "Have you ever kept using an app you disliked because switching felt risky?" Switching costs cut both ways: they'll block merchants from leaving your competitor, and from leaving you. You need to know how strong they are in your category.
10. "What would need to be true for you to try a new app for this next week?" Concrete and near-term. The answer usually names the exact objection — a migration path, a free trial length, a specific integration — that your launch has to clear.
The hard part isn't the questions
It's finding merchants to answer them. Forum posts get ignored, cold emails get deleted, and your friends' answers are too polite to trust.
That's the problem MAPI solves: we match developers with real merchants — filtered by plan, niche, and industry — who answer structured questionnaires, record screen walkthroughs, and take calls, because they're paid for their time. Start validating with real merchants, or if you run a store, get paid for answers like these.