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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

#51

Post by jakear »

drchiu wrote: post #16

My biggest problem with the ecosystem is how Shopify tries to deflect their own customer problems onto their partners to solve. And oftentimes, these same customers expect the partners to solve it for free. Examples: - Their default theme (provided by Shopify) has problems. Blame it on the app developer. "It's the app's fault." Yes, there are some poorly developed apps, but this lumps together the good with the bad.…

> Customers use the app review system to hold developer hostage for feature requests. "Create this feature for us and I'll edit my review."

To be fair this is pretty reasonable. Lets say 5 stars is highly recommend, 4 is recommend, 3 is neutral. If you’re building a new feature and it wouldn’t change anyone from being neutral about the product to recommending it, or from recommending the product to highly recommending it, maybe rethink building that feature.

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

#52

Post by cosmodisk »

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.

This is very poor from Shopify's perspective if that's the case: API can change as often as they want,but each new version comes as a new thing with its own documentation and so on,while the old ones stay there for a long time with whatever functionality was supported. I did receive some emails from Salesforce, saying they will be retiring version 7 of their API soon. Guess what, their current version is 51.

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

#53

Post by Axsuul »

mehphp wrote: post #10
donutdan4114 wrote: post #4

I've been building Shopify apps for around 5 years now, and have 4 apps with around 15k users. I feel the pain this author feels with some additional notes.. Our apps are built in PHP using the polaris.css for styling components. We have some embedded apps currently (before Shopify began requiring the session token). Personally, the embedded experience is only good for simpler apps. If your app is more complex with l…

I had the same issue with rate limiting and they doubled mine just by asking. YMMV

Doubled it on just your store or for every store you integrate with?

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

#54

Post by yowlingcat »

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.

> Good because if forces you to update and keep your app relevant.

That is the consumer being "good". There is nothing regarding the provider there which is good.

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

#55

Post by bookmarkable »

I'd be curious if any of the Shopify app devs in this thread have an opinion on how they handle customer data.

As a Shopify store owner, I was aghast how common it was on the platform to require allowing third party apps entirely too much information about my end customers. I was very uncomfortable leaving some otherwise promising apps installed in my store, and eventually gave up on Shopify entirely.

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

#56

Post by yowlingcat »

Does anyone have any experiences with Saleor? Shopify's tech seems like a clusterfuck by 2021 standards in a lot of ways (Liquid templates make theme reusability a pain or borderline impossible; backend issues mentioned in this thread), and yet, I'm not sure any of its mature proprietary competitors (Magento, BigCommerce, etc) are any better; if anything, I consistently hear that they are worse with some caveats.

What I am trying to figure out is if Shopify is "bad" or just "warty" -- I realize that is subjective and heavily depends on what one is trying to use it for, but it's still a challenge to reason about.

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

#57

Post by rxhernandez »

rexpop wrote: post #49
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.

> forces you to... Never good.

Python forces you to indent.

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

#58

Post by that_guy_iain »

I built a shopify app for my ecommerce monitoring system and my system is mostly written in PHP I have some Go and Python for various stuff by the core is in PHP mainly because I think PHP is really good language for web apps, it's designed for it, literally. I went to use the Shopify php library and it's literally dead, I looked at the issues and there was a Shopify employee advising people to use an unoffical one that basically supports everything. It's cool the employee pointed people in the right direction but I think it's a sad state of affairs that one of the most popular web programming languages in the word has no support from them.

Also, the reason people can't use Shopify with my system yet is that even to be approved for an unlisited application you need to allow for account creation via Shopify. I understand for listed apps in the store but if I want to have an app where they click a button on my site and I connect to their shopify system and get data I still need to support this feature I won't use. That saddened me. I just need to create time to allow for account creation via their app store and figure out what that means getting the info and how to handle user confirmation if at all.

(Shameless plug - https://www.ootliers.com)

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

#60

Post by disantlor »

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…

There are definitely several ways to set up complex Shopify shipping situations. My livelihood is in good part based on it.
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