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What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

ma.ttias.ch

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

#171

Post by tiltrus »

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.…

My experience as well r.e. the reviews. You'll get emails of people wanting an extended trial or wanting your app for free, or threatening to rate your app a 1 star review. When you contact Shopify about this problem -- they simply tell you to "work with the merchant." Being almost 1 year into this, and having app that's now finally paying my bills, I'm feeling that I am just becoming another Shopify tech support person. My next venture/app will definitely be outside of this platform.

Also, Shopify's free themes are all terribly slow. Kinda ironic considering how hard they're pushing us recently with new storefront app performance requirements.

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

#173

Post by bombcar »

nucleardog wrote: post #152
base wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Exactly - and in the USA I just need a “zip code = estimate” so I know if I’m looking at $10 or $50.

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

#174

Post by intermiras »

yowlingcat wrote: post #160
intermiras wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Thanks! I see what you're saying about Django apps but currently this is not a priority and taken the size of the project wouldn't be easy.

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

#175

Post by 6510 »

6510 wrote: post #147
arkitaip wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This sounds interesting. I sincerely thought a shop was just a website displaying products. I got this idea to work. People can buy things. Was that not the point? I can hear you wonder but yes, I'm really this naive. You are saying I'm missing out on 100x the profit? Could you give one or more examples of this?

If we drop all of the things not useful to developers (or actively get in the way) I'm left with:

Logically, at least some of the 1500 ready made adons must do something that is hard to make yourself. The downside is that you have to pay and that writing things (not available in their app store) yourself might be hard to impossible.

They offer SEO tools which (I hear) are quite good. End of the day yours is just another shoppify shop which makes it hard to compete with others doing the same thing on the same platform. WooCommerce is argued to provide better results. I have no idea how a self made website compares.

Integration with accounting software, shipping providers and payment processors out of the box is kinda nice but one should be able to figure this out.

There are also hundreds (joking) of downsides that I'm not able to judge.

Overall it seems a good solution if your store isn't to small and isn't to big. It might be fun using it to buy time while you transition from small custom to a large custom solution.

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