Ecommerce & storefront platforms

Ecommerce app marketplaces are where developers reach merchants who are actively looking to add functionality to their stores — subscriptions, reviews, upsells, shipping, tax, marketing automation, and more. Because the buyer is a business owner losing revenue to every gap in their stack, willingness to pay is high and distribution is built into the host platform.

The dominant model is the embedded app: your product renders inside the merchant admin (and sometimes the storefront) using the platform’s UI framework and APIs. Auth is almost always OAuth 2.0 at the shop level, with webhooks for order, product, and app-lifecycle events. Most stores take a revenue share on paid apps and run a listing review that checks performance, privacy, and API usage before you go live.

If you are deciding where to build first, weigh the size of the merchant base against review strictness and revenue share. Shopify has the largest paying audience and the most demanding “Built for Shopify” bar; WooCommerce and Magento trade central distribution for open, self-hostable extensibility.