Reading your Shopify Partner revenue: MRR, ARR, and LTV explained

If you build a Shopify app, your business is a subscription business, whether you think of it that way or not. And subscription businesses are run on a small set of numbers. Here is what they mean and how to actually read them from your Shopify Partner data.

MRR: monthly recurring revenue

MRR is the predictable revenue you collect every month from active subscriptions. It is the single most important number for an app business because it is recurring: a merchant on a $29 plan adds $29 to MRR every month until they leave. Watch the trend, not the snapshot. MRR going up and to the right means your acquisition is outpacing your churn.

ARR and ARPU

ARR is simply MRR times twelve, the annualized run rate. It is useful for talking about the size of the business. ARPU, average revenue per user, is MRR divided by active merchants. Rising ARPU means you are moving merchants up your plans or attracting higher-value ones.

LTV: lifetime value

LTV estimates how much a merchant is worth across their whole relationship with you. A rough version is ARPU divided by your monthly churn rate. If your average merchant pays $30 a month and 4% of merchants churn monthly, the average lifetime is about 25 months and LTV is roughly $750. LTV is what tells you how much you can afford to spend acquiring a merchant.

Reading it without a spreadsheet

The Shopify Partner API exposes the raw transactions and lifecycle events behind all of this. The hard part is turning them into a live dashboard. Most app teams either build one or pay for a tool like ChartMogul or Baremetrics.

Convot does it for you: connect your Partner account once and it syncs gross MRR, net payout, ARR, ARPU, LTV, installs, and uninstalls into a revenue dashboard, and then puts each merchant’s MRR, plan, and LTV beside the support conversation. The number you need to triage a ticket is right where you are already working, and you skip the separate analytics subscription.

Why it belongs in support

Metrics in a dashboard you check weekly are useful. The same metrics beside a live conversation are powerful. When you can see that the merchant messaging you is worth $1,800 in lifetime value, you answer differently. That is the whole idea behind revenue-aware support.

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