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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

#91

Post by 8note »

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…

Naming differences are the product of having names and enough surface area to where you can't remember all of what's in the API at once imo.

You can get variations in 2 digit country code vs 3 digit vs some other representation easily regardless of what language you're using

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

#92

Post by stickfigure »

disantlor wrote: post #60
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.

Oh sure... I make everything one pound, and create fixed rates for 1#, 2#, 3#, etc... but there's a (low) finite number of entries you can add, so if someone orders more than N units, they get free shipping for the rest. It's a terrible workaround. Etsy does not have this problem.

Or perhaps you are thinking about creating a carrier service, so Shopify will fetch shipping prices in realtime? That's for people on Shopify Plus plans, which costs $2k/mo+.

Actually, that's not quite true! There's a wholly undocumented option for non-plus merchants to get the carrier service feature enabled on their account for a monthly fee of something like $25. They have to reach out to support.

Everything with Shopify is like this. Great for consultants who have already internalized all this knowledge, sure.

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

#93

Post by colinloretz »

colesantiago wrote: post #89
colinloretz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 specifi…

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.

If you're not already in the Shopify ecosystem, I'd look at Stripe Subscriptions with Checkout which requires a small amount of development that lives in something like a lambda or netlify function. - https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/checkout - https://www.netlify.com/blog/2020/07/13/manage-subscriptions...

If you want something out of the box, there are tools like Memberful, Gumroad, etc that take quite a vig on top of the payment processing.

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

#94

Post by chiefalchemist »

I'm reading a good number of the comments and while I understand it's not a sample without bias, I have to ask:

How did Shopify get to be the beast that it is?

Why doesn't someone else step up and into what looks like a massive opportunity, especially since Covid have push so many transactions online?

I have worked with Shopify customizing themes and adding custom functionality. It good when it great and you're within its sweetspot. But then it drops off like a cliff. The developer workflow? Shockingly dated.

I've worked with WooCommerce. Great tool. But it requires knowledge and resources.

I've taken the BigCommerce training. Felt like Shopify 3.x but I'm not sure they're positioning well for the long term.

I know there are others.

It seems to me that there's a sweetspot between Shopify and WooComm. User friends yet also developer friendly. Perhaps not easy to do. But that's not humans on Mars either, is it?

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

#95

Post by pbreit »

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…

I don't really understand why developers use SDKs/libraries at all when the RESTful APIs are easy enough to consume directly.

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

#96

Post by pbreit »

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"

That's the opposite of good.

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

#97

Post by disantlor »

stickfigure wrote: post #92
disantlor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh sure... I make everything one pound, and create fixed rates for 1#, 2#, 3#, etc... but there's a (low) finite number of entries you can add, so if someone orders more than N units, they get free shipping for the rest. It's a terrible workaround. Etsy does not have this problem. Or perhaps you are thinking about creating a carrier service, so Shopify will fetch shipping prices in realtime? That's for people on Shop…

but why should it necessarily be that much different? better documentation sure, always. but in my experience Shopify solves ~70% of the cases extremely well and I, having learned some of the quirks, have very little problem filling the gaps. I will say, the app development, to the point of the article, IS a bit annoying hah. But I'm very surprised by all these API complaints. I think the API is very nice; maybe not quite Stripe-level but highly effective.

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

#98

Post by echelon »

pbreit wrote: post #95
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…

I don't really understand why developers use SDKs/libraries at all when the RESTful APIs are easy enough to consume directly.

Handroll marshalling for every payload, handle the auth sequence, check arguments, endpoint semantics, sort out sparse versus full entity patching mismatch, build in retry that matches status codes, and do this for every endpoint.

If you're moving fast, you don't have time for this. Especially if it isn't your core competency / core product.

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

#100

Post by arkitaip »

hahahahe wrote: post #68
arkitaip wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You did not recreate Shopify in a week. You think you did but you only implemented a custom solution that does 5% of what Shopify offers, including the expensive stuff like compliance, support, etc.

No sane business is going to use a random dev with a total custom e-commerce solution when they could throw a couple of dollars at shopify each month and get 100x the value.

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