Which Shopify apps are actually worth it? A selection guide for your webshop

A webshop with the wrong apps runs slower, costs more and sells no better than a webshop without them. The Shopify App Store now lists more than 16,000 apps, and most top-ten lists will not get you through that: they name tools that no longer exist, or features Shopify has since built in itself. This guide does the reverse. First what you can already do without an app, then how to recognise a trustworthy app, then an overview by need, and finally what a Belgian webshop needs on top. Every app below was checked in the official App Store. We deliberately name almost no prices, because those change faster than this article. Status: last checked in August 2026.

How many apps does the average Shopify store run?

Fewer than you would think. Research by speed vendor Hyperspeed across more than four hundred active Shopify stores (June 2026) found an average of 5.94 apps detectable from the front end, with a median of four. Heavily stacked stores run ten to twenty-five at once. The real number is higher, because apps that only work behind the scenes are invisible to that method.

Two caveats shape how you should read that figure. The measurement works from a store’s public source code, so your accounting connector or invoicing app is not counted. And the source is a company that makes webshops faster, so it has an interest in a story about app bloat. Treat the number as indicative rather than as a norm.

What it is genuinely good for: it disproves the idea that you need twenty apps to keep up. The question is never how many apps you run, but whether each app does a job you cannot solve without it. Anything that fails that test is a monthly cost plus extra code in your storefront. The full measurement also shows the spread per category.

What is already in Shopify, and when do you still need an app?

More than most app lists admit. Product copy, automations, translations, bundles, subscriptions, inventory management, international markets and VAT calculation all sit in the platform itself. An app is only justified once you hit a concrete limit of one of those built-in features. So start with what you already pay for.

Three things that stubbornly circulate wrongly are worth correcting here.

Shopify Payments is not free, but it is free of the extra fee. When Shopify Payments is your only payment provider, Shopify charges no additional transaction fee on top of your subscription. You always pay card processing rates, and those differ per plan. Work with an external payment provider and Shopify’s transaction fee comes on top of that provider’s own costs.

Shopify Markets is on every plan, not only on Plus. What differs is what you may do with it: collecting estimated duties and import taxes at checkout requires Advanced or Plus, and the number of active B2B catalogues is capped on the smaller plans. Selling internationally therefore does not require an upgrade first.

Shopify Tax covers the EU and the UK. If you sell inside the European Union or to the United Kingdom, Shopify Tax calculates VAT based on product type and destination country and generates compliant VAT invoices with the order confirmation, with support for the OSS and IOSS schemes. One exception Shopify names itself: automatic VAT invoices do not currently work for orders shipping to Portugal. Still unsure about the platform itself? Then the comparison between Shopify and the other e-commerce platforms will help.

How do you recognise a trustworthy app in the Shopify App Store?

Look at three things together: the Built for Shopify badge, the recent reviews and who the developer actually is. The badge means Shopify has tested the app on performance, design and integration, with the hard requirement that the app costs your storefront no more than ten performance points. That status is re-reviewed annually and can therefore also be lost.

“Built for Shopify status is the highest level of recognition and achievement that an app can reach.”

— Shopify, in the developer documentation on the Built for Shopify programme

Behind that badge sit measurable thresholds rather than marketing: at least fifty net installs on active paying stores, at least five reviews, and admin performance requirements at the 75th percentile (LCP up to 2.5 seconds, CLS up to 0.1 and INP up to 200 milliseconds). That makes it one of the few signals in the App Store you cannot buy.

But the badge is no guarantee of satisfaction. TaxJar carries it while sitting at 2.4 stars across 63 reviews (App Store, August 2026). The reverse holds too: Shopify’s own apps never receive the badge as a matter of policy, so its absence on Shopify Flow or Shopify Bundles means nothing. Always read the badge alongside the rating, the review count and the date of the most recent review.

Four signals that deserve a second thought:

• A listing with no reviews after years in the store. The app “Smart description by ChatGPT” has been there since September 2024 and still has not a single review. The function itself, generating product descriptions, is free in Shopify Magic.
• A name you recognise from a developer you do not. The Hotjar listing is not from Hotjar itself but from a third party, and the same goes for the connectors to Exact Online, Billit and Teamleader: those come from connector builders, not from those vendors.
• Two listings under the same brand name with wildly different ratings. Cin7 has a Core app and an Omni app that sit miles apart on rating. So check which of the two you are installing.
• No developer replies to recent negative reviews. The cheapest way to test support is to read how someone responds when things go wrong.

Which Shopify apps are worth it, per need?

Below you will find, per need, which apps sat in the official App Store in August 2026, what they do and when they become useful. It is deliberately not a ranking: the question is not which app is best, but whether your webshop needs that function today. Install one at a time and measure the effect before you add the next.

Reviews are, for most webshops, the first app that pays for itself, simply because they solve a trust problem your own copy cannot solve. What they actually deliver depends on your product, your price and your audience. The conversion figures app makers publish about this come, without exception, from those app makers themselves, so treat them as advertising and measure it in your own shop instead. How to set up such a baseline measurement is covered in the conversion optimisation playbook; the broader approach sits on our page about conversion optimisation.

The same sobriety applies to the AI apps. Plenty of them work, and plenty are an expensive shell around a language model. Which AI applications genuinely save time in a webshop is covered separately in marketing automation for Shopify.

Not sure which apps your shop actually needs? ClickForest builds and maintains Shopify webshops for SMEs in Flanders and will review your app stack in a free video call. Often the win is one app fewer rather than one more. You can also see our approach to Shopify e-commerce.

Which apps does a Belgian webshop need?

Three things that rarely appear in international lists: Bancontact as a payment method, an integration with your carrier, and a consent banner that works with Consent Mode. Bancontact runs through Shopify Payments itself and therefore not through an app. The rest of your stack barely differs from that of a Dutch or French webshop.

Paying. Bancontact is part of Shopify Payments and works for customers located in Belgium paying in euros. If you cannot or will not use Shopify Payments, Mollie has its own apps in the App Store for Bancontact and iDEAL among others, with the caveat that Shopify’s extra transaction fee then applies. For instalments the situation is clear: according to Shopify, Shop Pay Installments is available only in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, so it is not an option for a Belgian shop. The Klarna app for on-site messaging adds no payment method by itself; you arrange that with your payment provider.

Shipping. bpost has its own app for labels, parcel lockers and pickup points, and DPD Benelux has one for DPD Belgium and the Netherlands. Both are official, but their ratings are weak. Multi-carrier alternatives such as Sendcloud and MyParcel BE bundle bpost, DPD and PostNL into one flow with a returns portal, and score clearly better with merchants. Compare them side by side rather than defaulting to the carrier app.

VAT and compliance. For a Belgian webshop, Shopify Tax is the starting point, not the American tax apps that top English-language lists. TaxJar targets, by its own makers’ description, US sellers who do not use Stripe, and therefore solves nothing about your VAT return. The old Avalara AvaTax app has been retired and replaced by Avalara Tax Compliance, which you install through Settings and Taxes in your admin rather than through the App Store.

Measuring consent. In the EU a cookie banner is not a nice-to-have but a condition for using your advertising and analytics data properly. Consentmo and Pandectes both carry the Built for Shopify badge and support Consent Mode v2. Set that up correctly before you start advertising or optimising, because data collected without valid consent cannot be used.

Accounting. Connectors to Exact Online, Billit and Teamleader exist in the App Store, but they are built by connector companies rather than by those software vendors themselves. That is fine, but test such a connector with a handful of real orders before you rely on it, and check who maintains it.

What do you do when an app disappears or changes hands?

Count on it happening, including with apps from Shopify itself. Export your data while you can, note the end date and find the alternative before the deadline rather than after it. The pattern of recent years is always the same: the function survives, the app does not.

“On February 2, 2026, Stocky was delisted from the Shopify App Store. Stocky won’t be available after August 31, 2026.”

— Shopify Help Center, on migrating from Stocky to built-in inventory management

Five moves that can affect your stack today:

• Stocky (inventory and purchase orders) left the App Store in February 2026 and shuts down on 31 August 2026. The successor is the built-in inventory management in the admin and in Shopify POS. Export your historical purchase orders in time, because getting them back in is not straightforward.
• Oberlo (dropshipping) was discontinued on 15 June 2022, with DSers as the successor Shopify recommended and a migration path included.
• Handshake, Shopify’s own wholesale marketplace, has been quietly retired. Since 27 September 2023, Faire has officially been Shopify’s recommended wholesale marketplace.
• Avalara AvaTax was retired in the United States on 1 May 2025 and in the remaining regions on 31 October 2025. Avalara Tax Compliance took over that role.
• Apple Pay Later stopped issuing new loans in June 2024. That was a US-only service anyway, but it illustrates how quickly a payment option you tuned your checkout around can vanish.

Watch out for the opposite case as well: a listing that still exists while the app no longer does. The page for analytics tool Glew is still there, with a notice that the app is not available in the App Store. So before you pick an app, check the listing itself rather than the blog post linking to it. If you would rather outsource that follow-up work, that is what our maintenance and support covers.

How much should your Shopify apps cost?

Less than they deliver, and that is not a weak answer but the one rule that keeps holding. App prices change too fast to put in an article, so always check them on the listing itself. What does not change is the arithmetic: put the monthly cost next to what the app demonstrably earns or saves, and stop any app for which you cannot make that sum.

Three cost patterns that keep catching webshops out:

• Pricing per order or per contact. That scales with your growth. So calculate on the volume you expect next year, not on today’s, or you will buy back your own success at a premium.
• Features you pay for twice. An all-in-one app with reviews included alongside a separate review app is the classic. Run through your app list once looking for overlap and you will almost always find one.
• Campaign apps that were never removed. Last year’s banner is off your site, the invoice keeps coming.

What a webshop costs to build and maintain sits apart from your apps. Our rates for a launch, a migration or ongoing maintenance are on the pages about startup and migration and maintenance and support. If you would rather start yourself, the guide to setting up a Shopify webshop walks you through the basics.

How much do apps slow your webshop down?

Enough to measure, too little to panic over. In the Hyperspeed sample, stores with one to two detectable apps averaged a PageSpeed score of 53.2, against 38.3 for stores with sixteen or more. That is a correlation and not a proven cause: stores with many apps tend to be larger and heavier in theme and imagery too.

In practice that means three things. Measure your speed before you install an app, so you have a comparison point. Measure again a week later, on mobile, because that is where you see the difference first. And know that a removed app sometimes leaves code behind in your theme, so a cleanup is only finished once those remnants are gone as well.

The Built for Shopify performance requirement, a maximum loss of ten performance points, is a useful floor here: an app that cannot clear that is almost never worth it. How to tackle speed and Core Web Vitals further is covered in our guide to mobile optimisation for e-commerce, and what slow pages do to your visibility is in the Shopify SEO checklist and our e-commerce SEO tips.

Conclusion: how do you build an app stack that keeps working?

In four moves. Start with what Shopify already does, because Magic, Flow, Translate & Adapt, Bundles, Subscriptions, Markets and Shopify Tax cover more ground than most lists admit. Then pick one app per need, read on badge, rating and recent reviews together. Calculate the cost against next year’s volume. And schedule half an hour each quarter to cut what you no longer use.

What that buys you is not only a lower invoice but a webshop that stays fast and that you still understand when something breaks. If your stack is getting out of hand or you no longer know what each app does, ClickForest will take a look: we build and maintain Shopify webshops for SMEs in Flanders, with a single point of contact. Looking for a partner rather than an app first? Read how to choose a Shopify partner in Belgium. Questions about your own situation? Let us know.