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There seems to be quite a bit of shadiness going on in the Shopify App Store. A cursory review led to apps that give away the sun and the moon for free, which b
by areoform 6y ago
There seems to be quite a bit of shadiness going on in the Shopify App Store. A cursory review led to apps that give away the sun and the moon for free, which begs the question; how are they actually making money?
For example, this recommendation engine is "100% free", https://apps.shopify.com/orcinus-product-recommendation https://apps.shopify.com/orcinus-product-recommendation
Company page: https://autocommerce.io https://autocommerce.io , and there isn't a pricing plan in sight.
How exactly do you pay for the servers and dev costs? ML experts aren't cheap. They seemed to be backed by an app studio, https://www.innonic.com/en/ https://www.innonic.com/en/ . Is this a loss leader? Are they harvesting datasets and selling them to PE? Is it part of some master plan? Or, is it simply an influx of cheap capital in the wrong hands?
What's going on here?
This example is one of several I've found that seem to be data harvesting operations. Could someone trick non-technical folks into introducing severe vulnerabilities for all their customers via this? Tracking them across the internet for fraud or scummy marketing?
Edit: More examples,
https://apps.shopify.com/zoorix https://apps.shopify.com/zoorix
https://apps.shopify.com/upsell-funnel-engine-upsells https://apps.shopify.com/upsell-funnel-engine-upsells
Further cursory research shows that this isn't the only category with an impossible value : price ratio. What in the name of Baphomet is going on?
- apollo1213 6y agoThe recommendation engine may not require ML. The recommendation can be based on statistics of customers browsing history.
- areoform 6y agoWhile that may be true, any such application requires dev costs and some non-zero amount of computation. How do you pay for it while giving it away in a B2B capacity?
- apollo1213 6y agoAgree, those apps can be free for a short period time to attract customers and they have to introduce pay plans to pay for all the costs.