Augment is going to be very useful to you throughout the game. At early levels, it gives you daily officer shards which will be hugely beneficial for your crewing, especially below decks. Later, it will give you a steady stream of officer xp and transporter shards as you max them out. In addition, this store gives you access to the always rare independent credits.
When you first get the store, you will start collecting Botany Bay shards. This will lead you to the ship, which excels at mining data. After that, it’s basically just maintaining your levels of data and collecting all the rewards every day.