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The Shopify developer experience is terrible. No fluffy blog can change that fact. Shopify says the main product is the store owner. But the developers pick up
by uyuioi 7y ago
The Shopify developer experience is terrible. No fluffy blog can change that fact.
Shopify says the main product is the store owner. But the developers pick up all of the slack of Shopify.
Recurring payments. App.
Store backups. App.
Theme backups. App.
Order editing. Came late 2019.
Checkout. So locked down. Where’s the API?!
Slate tooling. Abandoned.
Starter themes. Abandoned.
Storefront SDK. Terrible documentation.
More than 1 variant image? App.
Metafields. App.
Wholesale. App.
Mailchimp. Removed.
People talk about google abandoning products. Shopify abandons nearly all developer tooling and is so locked down that it’s a constant “app for that” for the basics.
The interesting thing is theres been more than a few store owners I know that use Shopify. They’ve asked how to move off of Shopify.
I guess fulfilment is more important though. Right?!
- theturtletalks 7y agoShopify's business plan is offer minimum functionality for a low monthly fee and then users use the marketplace to add additional functionality which Shopify takes a 20% cut. I'm actually working on an open-source fulfillment and operations app for Shopify: https://github.com/openshiporg/openship https://github.com/openshiporg/openship I use it to build small apps that interact with the API directly instead of paying and relying on any apps.
- uyuioi 7y agoBut Shopify hold the transaction fee and charge 2% on top. So really in the end. Shopify is not that much cheaper. Considering bigcommerce doesnt charge this. I am bullish on the long term of bigcommerce. Or anything that goes after the small medium business. I don’t think Shopify could sustain a real entrance by Adobe with Magento, or a product in the same space from someone like Microsoft. As these companies know developer tooling and in the end. Shopify needs developers. Developers don’t need Shopify.
- theturtletalks 7y agoYes but their are ways to circumvent this. You could just use Shopify as a headless CMS for $9/month. Use their storefront API and a static site builder like Gatsby as your storefront. Then you can integrate your own payments and create the order on the backend. You could even use the new Stripe Checkout page.
- jeromegv 7y agoHmm, for a small retailer, Shopify offers the same transaction fee as you would get from Square / Stripe which is about 3%.
- stickfigure 7y agoAdobe with Magento Eh?? Maybe if they rewrite it from scratch and just recycle the brand...
- uyuioi 7y agoThey’re already heading towards Shopify’s lunch with commerce cloud. That’s quite obviously the outcome Adobe is after. It’s a subscription business after all.
- james_s_tayler 7y agoMagento makes me shudder.