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
#2[deleted]
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#3Shopify is an extremely restrictive platform for merchants and developers, I urge people not to use it if they wish to build on top of it.
There isn't ways to have a custom checkout (one page) with this system and subscriptions are not natively built in, relying on a third party ecosystem.
Theme development is also arcane and not the standard way web developers build a simple website.
Oh and they disallow you to use Stripe for your store and you have to go through Shopify payments instead.
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#4I'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 lots of options and settings and things to show, the embedded experience is SO SMALL. Literally 40% of the screen is taken up by the Shopify admin leaving only a small portion for your app. Makes interface design more difficult when so much of the top/left part of the screen is taken up by Shopify admin.
Their API and webhooks are "fairly" reliable. We're consuming around 10k to 20k webhooks per hour and performing 20k to 50k API calls per hour. We rarely have issues. We are using their Amazon EventBridge integration to accept webhooks as a sort of buffer against them DDOSing our applications.
The largest issue with their API at scale is dealing with the API limits of 2 to 4 requests per second. Since some things require performing multiple API calls, and we deal with massive e-commerce stores that may need to perform 100,000 tasks, it can take a long time to perform the work (we have to artificially delay the API calls to not hit their limits). Also their GraphQL API has a complex limit system based on the "amount" of data returned, which makes fetching data even more complicated than their REST API.
My other big gripe with their API is that they have a GraphQL and REST API with different features. They support different filters, different fields they return, different types of objects... It's a real PITA to try and work seamlessly between two different APIs (e.g. data formatted differently). And neither API is 100% solid, depending on the features your app needs you will basically need to use both APIs.
Generally my experience has been pretty good with Shopify. Their API changes can be scary, but at least they use versioning so they don't break the current version you're using. They are constantly adding new features too.
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#5Polaris does have a CSS file - https://github.com/Shopify/polaris-react#using-the-css-compo...
You are free to use it as you want, it doesn't support the dynamic components obviously since it's CSS. But you can easily reimplement the parts you want.
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#6Shopify is an extremely restrictive platform for merchants and developers, I urge people not to use it if they wish to build on top of it. There isn't ways to have a custom checkout (one page) with this system and subscriptions are not natively built in, relying on a third party ecosystem. Theme development is also arcane and not the standard way web developers build a simple website. Oh and they disallow you to use…
> not the standard way web developers build a simple website
I would like to see this standard described and what level of agreement you get.
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#7Shopify is an extremely restrictive platform for merchants and developers, I urge people not to use it if they wish to build on top of it. There isn't ways to have a custom checkout (one page) with this system and subscriptions are not natively built in, relying on a third party ecosystem. Theme development is also arcane and not the standard way web developers build a simple website. Oh and they disallow you to use…
While I agree with the first and second point.
Theme development is the same as any other system. It's very similar to a Drupal or Wordpress commerce. I am not sure I fully see what you mean.
Obviously they don't allow you to use another payment processor, why would they? They make money by having people use their payment processor. There is no benefit to them allowing people to bypass this and implement their own payment system.
The custom checkout can be a con, but it's also a pro. It allows your customers to feel at home in a native environment. Not having to deal with every ecommerce site completely different checkout system.
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#8I've heard shopify has been shaking down SaaS apps for past revenue % which they charge outside of the shopify ecosystem. Does anyone know if this is true or have more details?
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#9I developed on the Shopify platform for a while. I found it very odd how restrictive their endpoint was. Most of my job involved creating really hacky workaround for their weirdly missing features.
Re: What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
#10I'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 had the same issue with rate limiting and they doubled mine just by asking. YMMV