Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

ma.ttias.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 175 posts

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

#151

Post by flower-giraffe »

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…

> About 1 in 5 of my CI runs fail with mysterious 500 errors. It's infuriating.

I see these daily, with errors that suggest the cloudflare layer is unable to connect to origin.

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

#152

Post by nucleardog »

base wrote: post #123
bombcar wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is huge - and annoying. I like to avoid Amazon when I can, but if I can't figure out what shipping is going to cost until the cart is almost finished being checked out, I'll bounce.

In small business stores most users checkout as guests, so the website only has enough info to provide a shipping estimate after they have your address.

At least let me pick a country or something and give me a ballpark.

With a lot of US-only retailers the only way to find out they won’t ship outside the US is to try and checkout and look for a country drop down.

And the ones that will ship, shipping for a small parcel can range from inconsequential (free/$10) through punishing ($80) to absurd ($300).

I don’t need an exact amount, but there can be a couple order of magnitude difference between stores when trying to ship to Canada and often no way to determine they even will at all without going through the checkout flow.

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

#153

Post by flower-giraffe »

xal wrote: post #59

Lots of really fair feedback here. We hear you.

It’s great to see you are here and listening to feedback.

While we have you ear can I repeat a long-standing request.

Set price multi currency support.

We built an Ecommerce site for a leading global brand with thousands of SKUs.

The lack of a method to set a fixed price for multiple currencies on a single product in a store has created significant complexity for us.

We have to create a store with around a thousand SKU’s for each local currency just to set the price.

The software and process gymnastics required to synchronise product information, images, inventory data, fulfillments and tracking could be avoided with local currency pricing.

Having multiple stores makes it mostly impossible to make use of third party apps that would otherwise enable the client to do more with shopify.

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

#154

Post by pknerd »

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…

Being a python developer I am interested to know more. Are there resources you use to make the app? Do they provide rest api?

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

#155

Post by jimnotgym »

Cerium wrote: post #86
colesantiago wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With one site I developed with Shopify, I have a huge cart abandonment rate because of that 3 step checkout, even with the accelerated checkouts like Apple/Google Pay. A single page modal checkout on the same page is the way to go these days, even Stripe's new checkout is unfortunately doing the same thing with not keeping the user on the same page.

One thing with Shopify that drives the high abandonment rate is that shipping rates are usually not calculated until the second page of checkout. On many stores the only way to get a shipping estimate is to add something to a cart and get to the second page of checkout.

And that suggests to me that these are not the kind of abandonments that are going to be avoided by redesigning your checkout. This user weld simply bounce somewhere else instead. It is trivial to put a shipping estimate on the product pages, and make customers bounce there instead...but they will still bounce

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

#156

Post by jimnotgym »

flower-giraffe wrote: post #153
xal wrote: post #59

Lots of really fair feedback here. We hear you.

It’s great to see you are here and listening to feedback. While we have you ear can I repeat a long-standing request. Set price multi currency support. We built an Ecommerce site for a leading global brand with thousands of SKUs. The lack of a method to set a fixed price for multiple currencies on a single product in a store has created significant complexity for us. We have to create a store with around a thousand S…

We have this same problem. I am trying to work out at the moment if this is solved by using Shopify +

We manage it by our product data being in our ERP, and use Shopify as a dumb front end. The marketing people still hate it though.

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

#157

Post by flower-giraffe »

jimnotgym wrote: post #156
flower-giraffe wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s great to see you are here and listening to feedback. While we have you ear can I repeat a long-standing request. Set price multi currency support. We built an Ecommerce site for a leading global brand with thousands of SKUs. The lack of a method to set a fixed price for multiple currencies on a single product in a store has created significant complexity for us. We have to create a store with around a thousand S…

We have this same problem. I am trying to work out at the moment if this is solved by using Shopify + We manage it by our product data being in our ERP, and use Shopify as a dumb front end. The marketing people still hate it though.

> if this is solved by using Shopify +

It isn’t, plus makes it marginally less painful, single login etc. It doesn’t add anything for multi currency.

We did raise this with the plus onboarding guys and they confirmed it was not possible.

> We manage it by our product data being in our ERP

Same here, in fact we go one further and built a headless store in front, along with a proxy for inventory because the stock API is so slow.

The original goal was to use pure Shopify. The end result is more like a glorified shopping cart and and fulfillment backend.

If we did it again I think we’d be better off building on a payment provider like Stripe.

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

#158

Post by tasn »

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 think companies DDOSing endpoints is one of the least talked about issues with some webhooks implementations. Every time I tell people we offer it with Diahook[1] they look like it's the first time they even considered this...

[1] https://www.diahook.com

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

#159

Post by intermiras »

jconley wrote: post #72
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 w…

Thank you for the trust in Saleor jconley - Brava looks great! Mirek from Saleor here. While we originally started with the idea of fork-it-and-make-it-your-own, a huge part of our effort over the last 2 years was to provide enough API and structure to help avoiding forking. Extensibility through our plugins and extensions system (Saleor Apps) has became one of the big goals of the project and most big brands today don't take the forking route anymore. It's all about front-end development now with Saleor (where we recommend using NextJS or Gatsby as a "glue" for a JS/TS app). To further free developers' time we also developed Saleor Cloud and the burden of maintenance, upgrade and performance are on us.

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

#160

Post by yowlingcat »

intermiras wrote: post #159
jconley wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Thank you for the trust in Saleor jconley - Brava looks great! Mirek from Saleor here. While we originally started with the idea of fork-it-and-make-it-your-own, a huge part of our effort over the last 2 years was to provide enough API and structure to help avoiding forking. Extensibility through our plugins and extensions system (Saleor Apps) has became one of the big goals of the project and most big brands today d…

Hi -- glad to see you in my subthread! First of all, Saleor's codebase seems a lot closer to modern modularity than the rest of the open source e-commerce system, and so I like it architecturally from a high level. The main wrinkle I've seen, as you mention, is that I'd love to use Saleor in django as an app without having to fork it, which as of when I last looked at it (about 4-5 months ago) still wasn't possible.

This is because what I'm interested in is doing interesting things with the Saleor backend using it as a library not as a server, so to speak. That is to say, I'd like to be able to `pip install saleor` on my existing django backend, plug it into my app, and away I go without too much issue. How far away is Saleor's backend from this right now? Is this doable and it's just a matter of a finite number of steps, or are there deep structural challenges to supporting this sort of use case?

Thanks!

Post reply on HN