What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

Developer of Simple Purchase Orders here https://apps.shopify.com/simple-po

This is the best bit of developing for Shopify imo, this is the CEO reading the comments and taking them on board.

So here are some more!

Good - Partner support isn't great, however, if you can figure out how to get to a named employee, which is quite easy with their Slack for partners, they are super helpful. Just this week I am migrating to React and Polaris (mostly due to third party cookies being blocked by browsers and having to move to JWTs for auth). I had a niche problem that I dreaded going through support with, so I posted in the relevant Slack channel and a dev got in touch and fixed it for me in minutes.

Bad - 20% commission is starting to look expensive now Google and Apple have dropped their fees - They only pay out in dollars to PayPal which results in a 3% fee for non-US (and Canada?) devs since December - Python API is not kept up to date - There have been numerous copycat apps that the original devs have had to kick up a huge fuss to remove

Thanks to @donutdan and this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149528 for originally introducing me to Shopify Apps nearly 4 years ago, its been fun

This is a familiar struggle, as far as the concepts. I did a rather similar project based on Etsy about 10 years ago. We made a javascript-invoked widget (probably an iframe IIR), intended to be embedded onto blogs and webpages with a single line of code. This gathered a lot of data from Etsy. Shop details, items for sale, feedback, favoriters. Somewhere there's an article on the Etsy blog, but if curious you can check out this blog article. http://happycloudmoments.blogspot.com/2010/07/craftcult-intr...

At the time I already had a popular site based on their API. I had noticed that in general, it's a tough business to be a disconnected 3rd party developing on a closed platform. You're at the whim of the platform owner, slave to their intentions and decisions, good or bad. It's like having a remote job where nobody talks to you.

I got over API unreliability with a system to retry calls a few times. Etsy API calls could fail in several distinct ways, so my parser had a lot of stages (check for HTTP status, parse for certain strings, check if it's empty or an empty string, so forth). The calls also occasionally took much longer than usual. I implemented a caching system for the widgets.

It sounds like Shopify reliability is much worse than Etsy's at the time. Other than outages, I believe we'd get about 2% of calls failing for different reasons, which would usually work on a retry.

Changes were difficult to deal with because they could come suddenly. The worst ones were breaking changes that apparently Etsy was unaware of. I'd start getting errors and have no idea if it was a bug or an intentional change, and write workarounds only for them to fix the bug a few days later. We also experienced the removal of features with other apps. Or, one time we spent a couple months on a feature and then it turned out Etsy had been working on the same thing themselves.

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

The real question we should be asking is, is churn adding value? I understand security updates but otherwise you can only improve the wheel so many times before it just becomes a waste of time (decreasing marginal returns). Software engineering _badly_ needs a concept of finished version and mature software. Often there is very little gained from a new framework every few months besides assuaging the egos of a new generation of developers.

The question is whether the missing feature could be reasonably inferred to be present based on competing products or the product’s description.

Let’s say I buy a camera. It takes photos well enough, but I soon learn that it can only transfer the photos to my computer over WiFi or the cloud. This is terribly slow and not in-line with what I’d expect from a camera, so I leave a 3 star review saying that while it works fine, not being able to transfer photos quickly means I cannot recommend it, and that if this feature were added in a software update I’d rate it 5 stars.

Imo this is totally reasonable and a review whose contribution to the average rating I would value much more than “5 stars, the photos are good. I’m upset however that I can’t transfer them quickly, but oh well that’s a missing feature and I’m not allowed to complain about missing features in a way that affects the star rating because that would make the people who didn’t implant them upset”

On the other hand if I leave a review for the camera saying “3 stars, this did not come with a exposure and zoom configuration that let me capture the andromeda galaxy, please add and I’ll make 5 stars”, that’s a whole different story.

What would you recommend for a membership system, thinking about this route since waiting for Shopify's subscription API's to mature but time isn't on my side on this.