I read "Shopify App" as one that clones/competes with Shopify. I prefer "app that uses Shopify"
What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
61–70 of 175 posts
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#62Shopify 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…
Subscriptions is now available as part of their API. It does require a bit of time* to understand it though. * - May vary depending on your level of experience with GraphQL
We just built our own subscriptions on the Subscription API and it is extremely thin. Just a few gripes that I had to build around:
1. The "SubscriptionContract" isn't much of a contract at all. You can set a subscription to cancelled but still bill against it for example.
2. It keeps track of a "next billing date" but it does not bill the customer for you like Stripe does, you have to keep track of the next billing date and attempt to bill against the contract yourself.
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#63We'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…
> `import shopify` makes an API request.
Especially for a company that prides itself on great API design, this is head scratching.
‘shopify.Init()’ seems like such an obvious solution
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#64I read "Shopify App" as one that clones/competes with Shopify. I prefer "app that uses Shopify"
Shopify has an app store, similar to apple's app store. This is what the article is referring to.
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#65What does Shopify offer that a stripe integration doesn't?
Apples to Oranges.
Shopify allows non devs to easily set up an ecommerce store, that is their biggest value add. Things like inventory management, shipping, site hosting etc.
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#66Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Subscriptions is now available as part of their API. It does require a bit of time* to understand it though. * - May vary depending on your level of experience with GraphQL
We just built our own subscriptions on the Subscription API and it is extremely thin. Just a few gripes that I had to build around: 1. The "SubscriptionContract" isn't much of a contract at all. You can set a subscription to cancelled but still bill against it for example. 2. It keeps track of a "next billing date" but it does not bill the customer for you like Stripe does, you have to keep track of the next billing…
Is this subscription api suitable for digital only businesses that have say a membership system?.
Last time I checked most of the shopify apps out there are not suited to this.
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#68I 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.
Years? I did it in a week. Shopify is a platform of value add services. I can see mom and pops using it but not devs.
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#69Shopify 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…
Agree. Started off using it because everyone is and it's quick to get going and setup a store, but as soon as you do any custom stuff it's a nightmare. We eventually ran in to a problem where any site updates wouldn't save, and there's no way to debug anything. We'd started to move to bigcommerce so that just accelerated it. Bigcommerce is more flexible but settings all over the place.
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#70Biggest issue I'm dealing with is their integrated iframe app view and trying to persist a session since cross-site cookies are being blocked more and more. For instance Safari now blocks them by default and Chrome announced they are doing the same. That means when the user logs in via the frame, you can't set a cookie or add a jwt to the localstorage. All blocked and there are no workarounds. Awesome.