Shop: All your favorite brands

What it does

Shop brings shopping from participating brands into one app, with tools for browsing, checkout and following orders. It is made by Shopify, whose platform supports many online stores. That makes Shop most relevant to people who buy from different Shopify-powered retailers and want one place to keep tabs on purchases, rather than shoppers looking for a single retailer’s catalogue.

Shopping and delivery

The app includes Shop Pay, which can save checkout details for use at participating stores, and a delivery-tracking view that can gather order updates in one place. It also offers brand and product discovery, so the app is not limited to managing purchases already made. The range of products depends on the merchants available through Shop; it is not a general catalogue of every retailer.

Who it suits

Shop is a practical fit for frequent online shoppers who value quicker checkout and a consolidated view of deliveries. It may be less useful if you mainly shop in person, prefer to buy from a small number of stores with their own apps, or do not want another shopping feed on your phone. Discovery and order tracking make it both a shopping destination and a post-purchase organiser, so its appeal depends on whether you want both jobs in one app.

Scale and trade-offs

Shop has more than 50 million installs and a rating of 4.48 from about 663,000 ratings, indicating broad use, though those figures do not say whether it suits any particular shopper. Its convenience is tied to the participating merchant network and Shop Pay support: the app cannot make every retailer’s checkout or delivery information part of the same system. As a Shopify product, it sits closer to a shopping and order-management layer across many stores than to a single-brand retail app.