How Martin Cox Is Building Native App Co
Native App Co is a Melbourne studio Martin runs with his partner Mat, who builds out of Poland. They’ve already got four apps live on the Shopify App Store: Fish Wishlist, Stork Credit, Omnibus Owl and Product Pelican. Each one has its own animal mascot, and each one is built around a single rule: the app should feel like part of Shopify, not bolted onto it. The tagline says it straight, “Shopify apps that don’t feel like apps.” The reviews lean hard on a phrase Martin and Mat clearly earn: “big shoutout to Martin and Mat.”
What stuck with us was the bit Martin keeps circling back to. He sold his soul on LinkedIn, started a podcast called The Shopify App Show, and admits, cheerfully, that he hasn’t written a business plan. He doesn’t need one. He’s two months in, having ten conversations a week with merchants, and the whole strategy is to keep showing up until the right opportunities reveal themselves.
“I’ve got to embrace the fact I’m a ten tabs open at once kind of guy and roll with that.”
Martin Cox, Co-Founder, Native App Co
What Is a Shopify App in the AI Era?
A Shopify app used to be a feature your store didn’t have out of the box. That’s changing. In 2026, an app is increasingly the guardrails around what AI can already do to your store directly. We sat down with Martin Cox, co-founder of Native App Co, who put it plainly: someone could point Claude at their Shopify instance tonight and tell it to rewrite every product description. But that’s “pretty cowboy behaviour,” and nobody hands a mid-level coordinator that kind of access. The job of an app now is to make the underlying power safe to use at scale.
Store Credit Is the Promotional Lever Most Merchants Are Sleeping On
Most Shopify merchants file store credit under refunds. Martin reckons it’s one of the most under-used promotional mechanics on the platform, and it’s hard to argue with him once he lays it out.
Here’s the pitch. A discount code fires once, eats your margin, and the customer’s gone. Store credit sits in the customer’s account and pulls them back to your store to spend it. You get the second sale. Your acquisition cost spreads across two baskets instead of one. And because store credit is native to Shopify, it works with Shopify Markets, multi-currency, expiry dates and customer accounts with no extra plumbing.
What Stork Credit adds is the automation layer on top: spend-and-save tiers, welcome credit for new sign-ups, B2B segment rewards, bulk imports, even a gold-silver-bronze loyalty setup if you want one (Martin will be the first to tell you he doesn’t rate that one). Mostly, though, he keeps pushing operators back to how simple this should be.
“It’s Wednesday and sales are down and you need to find a way to get some more money through that weekend. It should be as simple as creating a promo, sending an email out on Friday morning, and just going and doing it.”
Martin Cox, Co-Founder, Native App Co
If you’ve been running the same tired ten-percent-off code on quiet days, swap it for store credit once and watch what happens to your next-order rate.
ATC listeners can try Stork Credit and the rest of the Native App Co family free for three months with the code ADDTOCART at nativeappco.com/addtocart.
Good Product Data Is the New SEO
Every conversation in ecommerce right now lands in the same spot: if you want AI search working for you, your product data has to be in shape. Martin’s Product Pelican app exists because most stores’ catalogues aren’t.
The problem is rarely intent. It’s consistency. Other systems feed data in, humans fill the gaps with their best intentions, and you end up with a catalogue full of inconsistent descriptions, missing alt text, half-populated Shopify taxonomy fields and metafields that don’t quite line up. None of it sinks a store on its own. All of it quietly stops you showing up cleanly in AI-driven discovery.
Martin’s fix is the one line worth writing on the wall. If you’ve got a yellow t-shirt, call it a yellow t-shirt. Not a musky tobacco t-shirt. Nothing clever. AI search has made plain English valuable again, because it’s how customers describe what they want and it’s how the models understand what you’re selling. The “Universal Commerce Protocol” that Google and the big retailers have aligned on assumes your data is structured and clearly written. If it isn’t, you don’t surface.
Product Pelican’s twist is that the AI prompts driving the audit are editable by the merchant. You can tell it to mention free shipping, or your three-year fridge warranty, or whatever signal matters in your category, and the rewrites work inside those rules. AI does the work. You keep the guardrails.
The Global Catalogue Changes What a Shopify Store Even Is
The longer-term shift Martin keeps coming back to is the one that should reshape how every merchant thinks about their product data. Shopify’s real long-term asset might not be the storefront, or even the checkout. It might be the catalogue itself, distributed across AI assistants, social platforms, agentic checkouts and surfaces that don’t exist yet.
If that’s right, the question stops being “how good is my website” and becomes “how good is my product data.” Nobody has fully cracked what the commercial model around a global catalogue looks like, and Martin’s honest that he doesn’t know either, even after sitting in the conference room where they talked about it. But the practical move is obvious. Getting your catalogue clean while most operators aren’t thinking about it is a genuine opportunity. Furniture marketplaces, niche category storefronts, micro-sites for a single campaign, all of it gets cheap to spin up once the data underneath is right.
“Focus on actually bringing the fun back to marketing and sales. That’s what I think’s the most exciting thing.”
Martin Cox, Co-Founder, Native App Co
Choosing Apps in 2026: Easy In, Easy Out
Martin’s framework for judging any app comes from years agency-side, watching merchants get burned. The rule is easy in, easy out. If a product is worth its monthly fee, it shouldn’t take two months to onboard, it shouldn’t burrow into your code base, and you should be able to rip it out cleanly if you change your mind.
Two filters he leans on. The first is Shopify Flow. If an app has its own Flow triggers and actions, it tells you the team built it with the platform in mind, not against it. It also means you can connect it to almost anything else in your stack without waiting on the app’s own integration roadmap, which Martin notes is often more marketing play than real engineering work.
The second is the human on the other end of the support email. The apps worth running are run by people who live and breathe that one function, and whose success depends on yours. Get them on a call before you commit. If they can’t or won’t, go find one of the two or three competitors who will. In Martin’s read of the ecosystem, there’s almost no vertical where that isn’t possible.
So the check before you install anything else is simple: can you pull it out in a day if it doesn’t work, and is there a real human you can email when something breaks?
The Takeaway
The Shopify app game has changed. The platform has absorbed the rational stuff, AI has lowered the floor on what’s possible to build, and the brands that win from here are the ones that get the unglamorous foundations right: clean product data, store credit set up properly, an app stack you actually understand. Martin’s two months in, having fun, and watching this shift from the inside.
When the catalogue becomes the distribution and AI does the discovery, are your products in good enough shape to be found?
Frequently Asked Questions
How is store credit different from a discount code on Shopify? A discount code reduces the value of a single order and the customer walks away. Store credit sits in the customer’s account and has to be redeemed on your store, so you capture a second order and your acquisition cost spreads across two baskets instead of one. Shopify’s native store credit feature also handles multi-currency, expiry dates and customer accounts with no extra setup.
What is Product Pelican and how does it help with AI search? Product Pelican is a Native App Co app that audits a Shopify catalogue for the gaps that hurt AI-driven discovery: missing categories under the Shopify taxonomy, weak product descriptions, missing image alt text, and inconsistent metafields. The AI prompts that power the rewrites are editable by the merchant, so brand-specific messaging like shipping terms or warranties can be built into the logic.
How do you decide whether a Shopify app is worth installing? Martin Cox’s rule of thumb is “easy in, easy out.” A good app shouldn’t take months to set up, shouldn’t bury itself in your code base, and should be removable in a day. Two strong signals of quality are Shopify Flow integration (the app has its own triggers and actions) and a real human you can email or call for support before you commit.
What is the Shopify global catalogue and why does it matter? The global catalogue is the idea that Shopify’s long-term asset isn’t any single storefront or checkout, but the universal catalogue of products across the platform, reachable through AI assistants, social channels and agentic shopping experiences. Nobody has fully cracked the commercial model yet, but the practical implication for merchants is clear: getting product data clean and structured now, while most operators aren’t focused on it, is a real opportunity.
Use the code ADDTOCART for three months free on any Native App Co app: nativeappco.com/addtocart
Based on Episode #643 of the Add To Cart podcast with Martin Cox, Founder and CEO of Native App Co. Join the Add To Cart community for free.
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