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What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

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

#71

Post by vdfs »

jeromegv wrote: post #47
bartread wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct, but if you make one call to a deprecated api, your app will be unlisted immediately

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

#72

Post by jconley »

yowlingcat wrote: post #56

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. Wha…

We use a forked and heavily modified Saleor at Brava (https://www.brava.com). Our version is over two years old. It brings with it all of the headaches of running your own eCommerce. At the time we chose it because of our requirements. If you want to geek out and implement lots of custom eCommerce stuff then go for it. It's a pretty good platform, but it's custom eCommerce, and eCommerce is complicated. If I just wanted to sell things I'd personally use Shopify or Webflow or such.

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

#73

Post by rxhernandez »

xmprt wrote: post #66
rxhernandez wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python forces you to indent.

Python is a great language for other reasons. Forcing you to indent isn't one of those reasons.

The statement wasn't on greatness. The statement was on "never good."

I think the programming community largely agrees that indenting is good. If something is forcing you to do something that is good, then it definitely doesn't fall into the category of "never good."

I can't think of a single time in the nearly 10 years of using Python daily that made me want it to operate differently w.r.t. indenting.

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

#74

Post by jwgraves2 »

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…

Many of the pain points in the OP and comments are things we're addressing at Saleor. Open Source First with Cloud option Exclusive focus on GraphQL API API-first rather than headless as an afterthought Solid Documentation *Responsive community and team Fastest growing oss commerce platform on gh. Proven at scale. For a headless solution that prioritizes dev experience above all else, please check us out.

(Full disclosure, Saleor Head of Growth. A friend sent me this link. Yes, my account is new.)

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

#75

Post by VRay »

jakear wrote: post #51
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 recommendin…

Man, I wish app reviews worked that way.. relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/937/

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

#76

Post by yen223 »

nirushiv wrote: post #63
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…

> `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

The fact that you can have side effects on imports, and that a lot of libraries relied on side effects on import, was one of my biggest sources of frustration with Python

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

#78

Post by jloveless »

xal wrote: post #59

Lots of really fair feedback here. We hear you.

There's also a lack of communication with the dev partners in general (e.g. the recent Service Worker issues). Building up a more robust partner program with (perhaps) a different support team could be really helpful.

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

#79

Post by colinloretz »

colesantiago wrote: post #67
colinloretz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you thinking for digital products like a PDF or purely for membership access?

When you create a billing attempt against a subscription, it creates a Shopify order that is tied to that subscription. You could definitely have the order be tied to a digital product.

While you could definitely make it work for a membership system, I think I'd recommend literally anything else. Happy to elaborate or answer any specific questions you might have.

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

#80

Post by elondaits »

jakear wrote: post #51
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 recommendin…

It's not reasonable. That's a psycho that paid for a product, got what they paid for, and now want to extort the developer for extra features instead of paying more.
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