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What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

ma.ttias.ch

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Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

#41

Post by theturtletalks »

dubcanada wrote: post #7
colesantiago wrote: post #3

Shopify is an extremely restrictive platform for merchants and developers, I urge people not to use it if they wish to build on top of it. There isn't ways to have a custom checkout (one page) with this system and subscriptions are not natively built in, relying on a third party ecosystem. Theme development is also arcane and not the standard way web developers build a simple website. Oh and they disallow you to use…

While I agree with the first and second point. Theme development is the same as any other system. It's very similar to a Drupal or Wordpress commerce. I am not sure I fully see what you mean. Obviously they don't allow you to use another payment processor, why would they? They make money by having people use their payment processor. There is no benefit to them allowing people to bypass this and implement their own pa…

The Shopify Billing API is extremely restrictive. Our application works with all e-commerce platforms (BigCommerce, Magento, Woocommerce, etc). We charge 1 monthly fee so a user can connect all of their shops. How are we supposed to charge the user if the first shop they connect is not Shopify? What if the 2nd shop is Shopify and they have already paid using Stripe? Shopify says they won't approve our application. Guess they don't like it when applications support more than just Shopify.

On top of that, there are applications that can have this payment flow except you need permission to accept outside payments. Shopify only gives this to established companies.

Late last year, they also got rid of unlisted applications and now all applications have to be approved even if you don't want it in their app store.

Shopify is building its moat and getting more and more restrictive. I'm very glad we abstracted all of the operations out of Shopify directly and now can use any platform or even Stripe directly. If you want to build an e-commerce store with Shopify still, use the $9/month plan and use Shopify just as a CMS and integrate with payments separately.

Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

#42

Post by arkitaip »

hahahahe wrote: post #35

I just don’t get why people continue to build around Shopify. Is Stripe/Square not good enough? Don’t you save a ton by forgoing Shopify?

Shopify offers a full ecom platform and let's you launch in days if you really have to. Upfront you aren't paying anything. Creating Shopify's functionality will take you years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop.

Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

#44

Post by clintonb »

hahahahe wrote: post #35

I just don’t get why people continue to build around Shopify. Is Stripe/Square not good enough? Don’t you save a ton by forgoing Shopify?

Stripe is only good for payments. Square does storefronts, but I have no experience with them. Shopify is “good enough” if you need to get a storefront up quickly, and integrate with payments and shipping.

Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

#45

Post by triceratops »

drchiu wrote: post #28
danpalmer wrote: post #25

We've just started developing a Shopify integration and used their Python API library because we're building it into an existing large Django codebase, and I've been shocked at the quality of the API library. We're now aiming to rewrite the bits we need. - `import shopify` makes an API request. If their API rate limits you, your server will probably crash. This happened to us in production. - That API request gets a…

> From what I can tell their API deprecation strategy is quite hostile to developers. Yes, every 3 months you need to revisit the API. It's good and bad. It means that if you're casually developing an app, this will consume a lot of time. Good because if forces you to update and keep your app relevant.

> forces you to update and keep your app relevant.

"Relevant" to whom? As long as the store is selling stuff, it's highly relevant to the buyer and seller.

Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

#46

Post by moron4hire »

> To my surprise every 10 refreshes or so, I would get a 404 error. For the hardcoded resource no less! It's frustrating to work with an API that already seems unreliable when testing locally.

Google actively does this with many of their APIs. Running locally, their APIs will be very unreliable. Once you're live on the domain you've configured, everything is much more reliable.

I don't know if they do it to force you to consider cases where the API returns errors, or if it's some kind of anti-scraping provision, but it can be extremely confusing and frustrating if it's your first time working with the API and you're not sure how things are going to actually work (if at all!) when you deploy.

Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

#47

Post by jeromegv »

bartread wrote: post #33
drchiu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From what I can tell their API deprecation strategy is quite hostile to developers. Yes, every 3 months you need to revisit the API. It's good and bad. It means that if you're casually developing an app, this will consume a lot of time. Good because if forces you to update and keep your app relevant.

Well, yeah, but why do they need to make changes to their API so frequently? This is both developer and business hostile. I get extremely pissy when paying for a service where the provider regularly dumps non-value-adding work into my product backlog that sucks up time I could invest in more valuable areas.

OP is wrong. While there’s a new version of the API after few months, they support older versions for 18 months. They have versioning.

Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

#48

Post by stickfigure »

theturtletalks wrote: post #40
stickfigure wrote: post #36

I built a print-on-demand system that integrates into Shopify stores. To vent a little... * I can concur that their API is unreliable. About 1 in 5 of my CI runs fail with mysterious 500 errors. It's infuriating. * The support channels are a wasteland. Do not expect help. * The documentation is super thin. At first glance it looks decent - there's the objects, there's the fields those objects have. But it's missing a…

Hey, I'm building an e-commerce operations platform that let's you connect any e-commerce platform to fulfillment and 3PL platforms. We're integrating with Printly and the like right now. Is there an API for your platform yet?

Yes, although you'll probably find that we are not an obvious fit for that model. Company info is in my profile.

Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

#49

Post by rexpop »

drchiu wrote: post #28
danpalmer wrote: post #25

We've just started developing a Shopify integration and used their Python API library because we're building it into an existing large Django codebase, and I've been shocked at the quality of the API library. We're now aiming to rewrite the bits we need. - `import shopify` makes an API request. If their API rate limits you, your server will probably crash. This happened to us in production. - That API request gets a…

> From what I can tell their API deprecation strategy is quite hostile to developers. Yes, every 3 months you need to revisit the API. It's good and bad. It means that if you're casually developing an app, this will consume a lot of time. Good because if forces you to update and keep your app relevant.

> forces you to...

Never good.

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