The Shopify app ecosystem is genuinely remarkable. There’s an app for almost everything, and installing one takes seconds. This accessibility is both Shopify’s greatest strength and, for many stores, an insidious source of operational drag.
We call it app stacking—the gradual accumulation of apps, each solving a specific problem, until the collection becomes a problem itself.
The Accumulation Pattern
It usually starts sensibly. You need email marketing, so you add Klaviyo. You want better reviews, so you add a review app. Upsells, subscriptions, loyalty programs—each app earns its place.
But apps don’t exist in isolation. They add JavaScript to your pages. They create their own data silos. They require their own management overhead. And they often duplicate functionality in subtle, wasteful ways.
The Coordination Tax
The real cost of app stacking isn’t the monthly fees—it’s the coordination overhead. Your team needs to understand how apps interact. Data flows become complex. Customer experiences become fragmented across different systems.
When something breaks, troubleshooting means checking multiple apps. When you want to make a change, you need to consider impacts across your entire app ecosystem. The cognitive load on your team steadily increases.
Finding the Right Balance
The solution isn’t to avoid apps entirely—that would mean reinventing wheels constantly. Instead, it’s about periodic reassessment. Which apps are truly essential? Which have been superseded by other tools? Which create more coordination cost than value?
Sometimes the answer is consolidation—replacing three apps with one that does all their jobs. Sometimes it’s custom development—building exactly what you need without the overhead of generic solutions. And sometimes it’s simply removing apps you’ve outgrown.