Show IH: Built a free Shopify app that shows ingredient safety ratings on beauty product pages — looking for beta testers
Hey IH! 👋
I'm Donghyun, a solo dev from Korea. Spent the last few months building Skinin Ingredient Checker — a free Shopify Theme App Extension for clean beauty and skincare brands.
The problem:
Clean beauty shoppers want to know what's in their products before buying. Most Shopify brands have no easy way to show this without expensive custom dev work.
What Skinin does:
- Reads ingredient list from product description
- Displays a color-coded "What's inside?" widget on the product page
- 1,500+ ingredient database across 10 categories
- Customers can tap each ingredient to see safety details
- Takes ~5 min to set up, 100% free
Where I'm at:
- Live on Shopify App Store ✅
- 0 reviews (this is the hard part 😅)
- Reached out to 20+ brands via Instagram DM — crickets so far
What I'm looking for:
If you run or know a Shopify beauty/skincare store, I'd love to get 3-5 beta testers. I'll personally help with setup and would love honest feedback.
Happy to answer any questions — and would love feedback on my outreach strategy too!
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The build sounds clean and the 5-minute setup is the right call for Shopify. On your actual question, why 20+ brands went quiet and whether transparency is a conversion, trust, or nice-to-have problem, there is a third possibility worth naming, because it might be a silent reason for some of the no-replies.
The moment your widget puts a "safety rating" on an ingredient, the brand is now publishing a safety claim about its own product, on its own product page.
That is a regulated space. In the US the FTC expects health and safety claims to be substantiated, and an ingredient supplier or a competitor can challenge a "rating" as misleading.
In the EU the cosmetics claims rules (the Common Criteria) specifically forbid denigrating ingredients that are legally permitted, which a hazard-style score can do.
A brand that has a compliance person will not bolt a third-party "safety score" onto its product page without clearing it first, and that hesitation looks exactly like "bad outreach" from your side.
The fix is mostly framing. "Ingredient transparency" and "what's inside" plus sourcing info is descriptive and defensible, and brands can adopt it freely.
"Safety ratings" is a claim they have to own. If you reposition around transparency rather than safety scoring, you remove the thing that makes a careful brand pause.
The brands most likely to want this are also the ones most sensitive to claims risk, so getting ahead of it might turn some of those silent no's into yes's.
This is the most useful comment on this whole post — thank you.
I hadn't thought about it from the compliance angle at all. I was treating "safety rating" as a UX label, not realizing it reads as a claim the brand has to defend.
The distinction you're drawing — descriptive/transparency vs. claim/score — makes a lot of sense. Reframing something like "Low concern" to something more like "Commonly used" or "Well-documented" seems like it would remove the claim entirely while still giving shoppers the same information.
Quick question: do you think the underlying categorization (safe/caution/avoid) is the actual problem, or is it mostly the labeling/language on top of it? I'm trying to figure out if this is a copy fix or a deeper structural one.
Honestly, what makes me hesitate isn't the lack of reviews.
It's the fact that 20+ outreach attempts produced almost no signal.
I've seen founders assume that means they need better outreach when sometimes it means the thing being tested isn't the part buyers are evaluating first.
That's why I'd be careful before optimizing the DM strategy too much.
The feedback I'd want most right now is whether beauty brands see ingredient transparency as a conversion problem, a trust problem, or just a nice-to-have.
Those can look similar early on but usually lead to very different outcomes.
This hits harder than I want to admit.
I've been treating the silence as a messaging/outreach problem this whole time — better subject lines, better timing, more personalization. It never occurred to me that the silence itself might be the data, telling me the thing isn't ranked high enough on their list to even respond to.
Honestly I don't know the answer to conversion vs. trust vs. nice-to-have yet. I've been asking brands to install the app, not asking them how they think about ingredient transparency as a business problem.
Those feel like very different conversations. The first is a pitch. The second is research.
If you were in my position, would you go back to the brands that went silent and ask the research question directly? Or is that conversation better had with brands that already do some form of ingredient communication (even manually), since they've already decided it matters?
That's exactly why I stopped short earlier.
I don't think the interesting part is choosing between those conversations.
I think it's the decision sitting underneath that choice.
I'd be careful answering that casually because it can make the same outreach data mean very different things.
I wouldn't try to unpack that properly in a thread.
If you'd like the tighter version, drop your email and I'll put it together properly.
Appreciate you taking it seriously enough to not
want to rush it. Happy to take this to email —
[email protected]
Genuinely curious what's underneath the choice
I haven't seen yet.
Sent you a note over email.
Looks good can you post this on my forum : ) https://dev.us.kg/