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What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

366 points by Dragony 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
colesantiago 6y ago
Shopify 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.
- harlanlewis 6y ago
  > 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.
  - iamdbtoo 6y ago
    Not OP, and I don't know if you've ever worked within Shopify, but the developer experience is generally terrible. They've given up supporting most of their own tools and basically just tell you to work within their site admin IDE which is also lacking in many ways.
- dubcanada 6y ago
  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.
  - colesantiago 6y ago
    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.
    - Cerium 6y ago
      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.
      - bombcar 6y ago
        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.
        base 6y ago
        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.
        nucleardog 6y ago
        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.
- drchiu 6y ago
  Subscriptions is now available as part of their API. It does require a bit of time* to understand it though. * - May vary depending on your level of experience with GraphQL
  - colesantiago 6y ago
    *API But not natively within Shopify's UI, You have to use 3rd party apps have to make use of this API. For merchants this is useless to them if they don't want to use a 3rd party app for this feature.
  - colinloretz 6y ago
    We just built our own subscriptions on the Subscription API and it is extremely thin. Just a few gripes that I had to build around: 1. The "SubscriptionContract" isn't much of a contract at all. You can set a subscription to cancelled but still bill against it for example. 2. It keeps track of a "next billing date" but it does not bill the customer for you like Stripe does, you have to keep track of the next billing date and attempt to bill against the contract yourself.
    - colesantiago 6y ago
      Is this subscription api suitable for digital only businesses that have say a membership system?. Last time I checked most of the shopify apps out there are not suited to this.
      - colinloretz 6y ago
        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 specific questions you might have.
        6y ago
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- LargeWu 6y ago
  They integrate with a lot of payment gateways, even if Stripe isn't one of them. https://www.shopify.com/payment-gateways/united-states https://www.shopify.com/payment-gateways/united-states
  - colesantiago 6y ago
    Have to admit, while this is good and reassuring for accepting worldwide payments, Shopify is no good on the subscriptions front and this is very poor if your subscriptions business is digital, like a membership system.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Is Gumroad a better fit perhaps for this use case?
      - colesantiago 6y ago
        Gumroad looks cool, but the percentages they are taking are extortionate, not sure if they are better. It would get to a point where I am giving thousands of pounds to Gumroad to lock myself in. How customisable is it, can it do Apple / Google Pay?
        toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Not sure if it does mobile payments natively. Depending on your content, Ghost [1] might be another option with a more palatable cost. [1] https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
  - SahAssar 6y ago
    In that case they still take 2% which is pretty absurd.
- mingabunga 6y ago
  Agree. Started off using it because everyone is and it's quick to get going and setup a store, but as soon as you do any custom stuff it's a nightmare. We eventually ran in to a problem where any site updates wouldn't save, and there's no way to debug anything. We'd started to move to bigcommerce so that just accelerated it. Bigcommerce is more flexible but settings all over the place.
donutdan4114 6y ago
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 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.
- mehphp 6y ago
  I had the same issue with rate limiting and they doubled mine just by asking. YMMV
  - Axsuul 6y ago
    Doubled it on just your store or for every store you integrate with?
dubcanada 6y ago
Polaris does have a CSS file - https://github.com/Shopify/polaris-react#using-the-css-components 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.
deedubaya 6y ago
I'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?
- drchiu 6y ago
  Yes, this is true. There's a lot of pressure, I suspect, since they've come out as a publicly traded company. I've built on Shopify before. While they're great, you'll find that it's hard to grow your company in it (save for a few notable exceptions). And then there's the platform dependent nature of it all. I would not build a business on top of another company's platform.
- boringg 6y ago
  They did that for a couple developer companies that were intentionally not paying their rev-share agreement. There was an article on HN about it recently. It made sense that they would take down bad actors in the community.
- JaggedJax 6y ago
  Their terms seem a little unclear to me, but it seems that they claim they are due a percentage of anything you charge a customer who uses your Shopify app, even if you don't bill extra for use of that app. However in practice I have found Shopify not too strict about fees charged outside of Shopify. I suppose if you were actually charging your customers specifically for the app but doing it outside Shopify to avoid the cut they would come after you. I find BigCommerce a worse offender here. They copied Shopify's terms and constantly hound you asking for a cut of money even if you offer a free plugin with your standard service. Their method of collecting this info is also arcane, manual, and threatening. I would drop BigCommerce support in a second if they challenged us on this. So far they have backed down when we tell them we don't charge extra specifically for BigCommerce. But they still hound us monthly to submit a $0 report.
trutannus 6y ago
I 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.
isoskeles 6y ago
Maybe not that helpful of an addition, but the most surprising thing I found was that Shopify has an option for an "app proxy", in which you can have some separate, custom web server that gets proxied through your Shopify store. I've used this to some success in building a more robust product customization app (with functionality very specific to our business), more so than what I could find on their store. The biggest con for using the app proxy is around authentication. You can't do much special stuff with auth, basically the simplest option is to just wrap your proxied pages in a liquid check for customer.id. (Although, I can see this as a pro rather than a con, as it forces you to keep the proxy app simple.) My biggest worry is one day Shopify just decides to discontinue app proxies. It doesn't seem like an option they try to point developers toward, so I don't trust it and am thinking about building on top of their API to avoid this.
drchiu 6y ago
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. - Customers use the app review system to hold developer hostage for feature requests. "Create this feature for us and I'll edit my review." - Shopify's customer service reps says, "It must be the app that's causing this." Reading the CSR's emails, it is clear that this person does not understand the (technical) issues and is only trying to close the ticket. Customer takes what the CSR says as gospel and you, as the developer, spends a lot of time trying to fight that mindset. I can't help but feel a big part of Shopify's early strategy was that the demographic of customers they were trying to attract just weren't a great type of customer, and that the partner program allowed them to enlist a lot of hungry developers willing to work for free (or next to nothing). There is definitely room for improvement. I have mixed feelings about it, as their ecosystem provided me with a way to make a living many years ago. I don't depend on them anymore, but I wouldn't argue against trying your luck out there if you're starting out. Just recognize that there is a certain culture and way of practice there.
- iamdbtoo 6y ago
  This is similar my experience with making Shopify themes. It definitely feels like the third-parties that support the platform are not really considered. The developer experience is generally terrible and there's little incentive to change it because the developer isn't Shopify's customer, that would be the shop owner.
- jakear 6y ago
  > Customers use the app review system to hold developer hostage for feature requests. "Create this feature for us and I'll edit my review." To be fair this is pretty reasonable. Lets say 5 stars is highly recommend, 4 is recommend, 3 is neutral. If you’re building a new feature and it wouldn’t change anyone from being neutral about the product to recommending it, or from recommending the product to highly recommending it, maybe rethink building that feature.
LMYahooTFY 6y ago
So I appear to be on a Shopify black list. I've called them, my bank, and on a few occasions even tried other people's cards. I'm declined no matter what, by Shopify. It's been this way for well over a year. Sometimes retailers will manually process a transaction, but otherwise it's infuriating for me to see Shopify grow in the market.
- tyingq 6y ago
  You can see some of the indicators they use here: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/orders/fraud-analysis#fraud-analysis-indicators https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/orders/fraud-analysis#fra... The thing where it calculates ip geolocation distance from the shipping address is a potential culprit. Maybe your IP address has a bad entry in their ip geo mapping software. They also don't like proxies and VPNs.
- ganeshkrishnan 6y ago
  anything to do with marijuana, they will ban you because they are processed by stripe and american company
danpalmer 6y ago
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 dynamic list of supported API versions. If the version you've hard-coded in your app (because it's what you support) is no longer in that list, it will raise a VersionNotFoundError and your app will probably fail in some significant way. - There's no connection persistence. Every API call sets up and tears down a full connection, a noticeable performance impact. - Internally the library uses a lot of global state, it's certainly not safe to use in async code – too easy to use the wrong credentials on a request – and I suspect it's also not thread safe. - Despite having something called a Session, very similar in documentation to a requests.Session or httpx.Session, it's neither, it's just a container for some creds. No sessions are available at all. - It's mostly a wrapper around Pyactiveresource, which appears to have a lot of similar issues – internal state that's hidden that causes things to not work as you expect. I suspect that the Python library was developed by Ruby engineers, some of the practices are things I've seen in Ruby but that just don't fit into the Python ecosystem. From what I can tell their API deprecation strategy is quite hostile to developers. I think it would be difficult to build what I'd consider to be production-grade services on top of the library. This is in stark contrast to others such as Stripe's API/libraries which are fantastic.
- drchiu 6y ago
  > 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.
  - bartread 6y ago
    Well, yeah, but why do they need to make changes to their API so frequently? This is both developer and business hostile. I get extremely pissy when paying for a service where the provider regularly dumps non-value-adding work into my product backlog that sucks up time I could invest in more valuable areas.
brunojppb 6y ago
I share some of the pains the author raises. One major thing that is a bit discouraging is the inconsistent feature support they have between REST and GraphQL APIs. Neither of them cover all functionalities, so sometimes you have to be bouncing back and forth between REST and GraphQL. On the other hand, they are doing an amazing job and constantly providing updates. Their docs are really good and improving everyday. Kudos to the shopify dev team.
- nsomaru 6y ago
  Curious as to why this is being downvoted? Could down voters please share their views?
picodguyo 6y ago
Ugh, I can so relate to this right now. I followed their Node embedded app tutorial closely, submitted my app, then found out they no longer allow embedded apps to use cookies like their tutorial does. Finding up to date documentation is a struggle and some of the components they suggest you use are closed source and completely undocumented.
- flycatcha 6y ago
  I had previously built a rails app using Shopify CLI and it failed review due to some endless cookies loop that I could not reproduce caused by their gem. In the end, I just rolled my own OAuth / user database / Billing - but talk about a waste of time.
hahahahe 6y ago
I just don’t get why people continue to build around Shopify. Is Stripe/Square not good enough? Don’t you save a ton by forgoing Shopify?
- arkitaip 6y ago
  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.
  - hahahahe 6y ago
    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.
    - arkitaip 6y ago
      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.
      - 6510 6y ago
        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?
        6510 6y ago
        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.
stickfigure 6y ago
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 all the details about how those fields are supposed to work. Example: A Fulfillment has a tracking_numbers array, but there doesn't seem to be any way to add multiple tracking numbers. The docs are silent, and questions about this in the support channels remain unanswered. For years. * There are two completely different APIs (graphql and REST), which do not have equal capabilities. If Shopify is planning on deprecating one of them, they should give us guidance. * The API is inconsistent. I count at least FIVE different representations of an Address structure, each slightly different for no apparent reason. Eg "country" vs "countryCode". This is the kind of thing that creeps into projects in dynamic languages when nobody's paying attention. * There's a lot of overengineered stuff. The Metadata API is really unpleasant compared to Stripe's simpler approach. * There's no way to set up common shipping scenarios like "$N for first item, $M for each additional". I could go on. But I will say this: It's better than Etsy's API. Though Etsy is finally working on it again, so maybe that will change.
- theturtletalks 6y ago
  Hey, I'm building an e-commerce operations platform that let's you connect any e-commerce platform to fulfillment and 3PL platforms. We're integrating with Printly and the like right now. Is there an API for your platform yet?
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    Yes, although you'll probably find that we are not an obvious fit for that model. Company info is in my profile.
- disantlor 6y ago
  There are definitely several ways to set up complex Shopify shipping situations. My livelihood is in good part based on it.
lawwantsin17 6y ago
Shopify is API garbage. I can't believe these idiots are eating e-commerce.
darepublic 6y ago
What does Shopify offer that a stripe integration doesn't?
- paultannenbaum 6y ago
  Apples to Oranges. Shopify allows non devs to easily set up an ecommerce store, that is their biggest value add. Things like inventory management, shipping, site hosting etc.
moron4hire 6y ago
> To my surprise every 10 refreshes or so, I would get a 404 error. For the hardcoded resource no less! It's frustrating to work with an API that already seems unreliable when testing locally. Google actively does this with many of their APIs. Running locally, their APIs will be very unreliable. Once you're live on the domain you've configured, everything is much more reliable. I don't know if they do it to force you to consider cases where the API returns errors, or if it's some kind of anti-scraping provision, but it can be extremely confusing and frustrating if it's your first time working with the API and you're not sure how things are going to actually work (if at all!) when you deploy.
JRGC 6y ago
+1 on page layout
bookmarkable 6y ago
I'd be curious if any of the Shopify app devs in this thread have an opinion on how they handle customer data. As a Shopify store owner, I was aghast how common it was on the platform to require allowing third party apps entirely too much information about my end customers. I was very uncomfortable leaving some otherwise promising apps installed in my store, and eventually gave up on Shopify entirely.
- moneywoes 6y ago
  What did you move to?
yowlingcat 6y ago
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. What I am trying to figure out is if Shopify is "bad" or just "warty" -- I realize that is subjective and heavily depends on what one is trying to use it for, but it's still a challenge to reason about.
- jconley 6y ago
  We use a forked and heavily modified Saleor at Brava (https://www.brava.com 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 wanted to sell things I'd personally use Shopify or Webflow or such.
  - intermiras 6y ago
    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.
    - yowlingcat 6y ago
      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!
that_guy_iain 6y ago
I built a shopify app for my ecommerce monitoring system and my system is mostly written in PHP I have some Go and Python for various stuff by the core is in PHP mainly because I think PHP is really good language for web apps, it's designed for it, literally. I went to use the Shopify php library and it's literally dead, I looked at the issues and there was a Shopify employee advising people to use an unoffical one that basically supports everything. It's cool the employee pointed people in the right direction but I think it's a sad state of affairs that one of the most popular web programming languages in the word has no support from them. Also, the reason people can't use Shopify with my system yet is that even to be approved for an unlisited application you need to allow for account creation via Shopify. I understand for listed apps in the store but if I want to have an app where they click a button on my site and I connect to their shopify system and get data I still need to support this feature I won't use. That saddened me. I just need to create time to allow for account creation via their app store and figure out what that means getting the info and how to handle user confirmation if at all. (Shameless plug - https://www.ootliers.com https://www.ootliers.com)
xal 6y ago
Lots of really fair feedback here. We hear you.
- jloveless 6y ago
  There's also a lack of communication with the dev partners in general (e.g. the recent Service Worker issues). Building up a more robust partner program with (perhaps) a different support team could be really helpful.
- ghostapps 6y ago
  Developer of Simple Purchase Orders here https://apps.shopify.com/simple-po https://apps.shopify.com/simple-po This is the best bit of developing for Shopify imo, this is the CEO reading the comments and taking them on board. So here are some more! Good - Partner support isn't great, however, if you can figure out how to get to a named employee, which is quite easy with their Slack for partners, they are super helpful. Just this week I am migrating to React and Polaris (mostly due to third party cookies being blocked by browsers and having to move to JWTs for auth). I had a niche problem that I dreaded going through support with, so I posted in the relevant Slack channel and a dev got in touch and fixed it for me in minutes. Bad - 20% commission is starting to look expensive now Google and Apple have dropped their fees - They only pay out in dollars to PayPal which results in a 3% fee for non-US (and Canada?) devs since December - Python API is not kept up to date - There have been numerous copycat apps that the original devs have had to kick up a huge fuss to remove Thanks to @donutdan and this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149528 for originally introducing me to Shopify Apps nearly 4 years ago, its been fun
- diweirich 6y ago
  Would love to see the online store design experience released. Just throwing that out there. Excited to explore the possibilities.
- ascorbic 6y ago
  CORS support in the predictive search API please, or better search in the Storefront API.
- 6y ago
intrasight 6y ago
I read "Shopify App" as one that clones/competes with Shopify. I prefer "app that uses Shopify"
- paultannenbaum 6y ago
  Shopify has an app store, similar to apple's app store. This is what the article is referring to.
  - intrasight 6y ago
    I didn't know that it had gone from being a payment API to a developer platform.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sarabad2021 6y ago
Biggest issue I'm dealing with is their integrated iframe app view and trying to persist a session since cross-site cookies are being blocked more and more. For instance Safari now blocks them by default and Chrome announced they are doing the same. That means when the user logs in via the frame, you can't set a cookie or add a jwt to the localstorage. All blocked and there are no workarounds. Awesome.
code_duck 6y ago
This is a familiar struggle, as far as the concepts. I did a rather similar project based on Etsy about 10 years ago. We made a javascript-invoked widget (probably an iframe IIR), intended to be embedded onto blogs and webpages with a single line of code. This gathered a lot of data from Etsy. Shop details, items for sale, feedback, favoriters. Somewhere there's an article on the Etsy blog, but if curious you can check out this blog article. http://happycloudmoments.blogspot.com/2010/07/craftcult-introduces-pocket-shop-widget.html http://happycloudmoments.blogspot.com/2010/07/craftcult-intr... At the time I already had a popular site based on their API. I had noticed that in general, it's a tough business to be a disconnected 3rd party developing on a closed platform. You're at the whim of the platform owner, slave to their intentions and decisions, good or bad. It's like having a remote job where nobody talks to you. I got over API unreliability with a system to retry calls a few times. Etsy API calls could fail in several distinct ways, so my parser had a lot of stages (check for HTTP status, parse for certain strings, check if it's empty or an empty string, so forth). The calls also occasionally took much longer than usual. I implemented a caching system for the widgets. It sounds like Shopify reliability is much worse than Etsy's at the time. Other than outages, I believe we'd get about 2% of calls failing for different reasons, which would usually work on a retry. Changes were difficult to deal with because they could come suddenly. The worst ones were breaking changes that apparently Etsy was unaware of. I'd start getting errors and have no idea if it was a bug or an intentional change, and write workarounds only for them to fix the bug a few days later. We also experienced the removal of features with other apps. Or, one time we spent a couple months on a feature and then it turned out Etsy had been working on the same thing themselves.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
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?
- jeromegv 6y ago
  At the end of the day, the customer is the one deciding what they will pay for based on what is available to them. Majority of apps are on Shopify. Customer has no knowledge of the dev tools and how hard they are to use.
  - chiefalchemist 6y ago
    Yes and no. The issue here is presenting as "dev friendly" and not being true to that. Wix, Webflow, Squrespace don't do that. They're not. But Shopify wants to say one thing but do another. Why do devs subject themselves to a platform with well known limitations. Note: I like Shopify. But only for cases that are within its sweet spot.
- base 6y ago
  There are a lot of options in e-commerce, all of them with thousands of shops: WooCommerce, Magento, Jumpseller, Bigcommerce, Prestashop, Wix WooCommerce etc...
- 6510 6y ago
  > How did Shopify get to be the beast that it is? Its amazingly simple to get started. It will push the products into a shoppingCart array, do the arithmetic adding up the prices. Clearly not something you should pay for. It's one hell of a deal - for them. I'm sure there is a special place in hell for self proclaimed developers who want to help shopify create a playstore/appstore like monopoly. I'm happy they are this terrible at everything nice. But the getting started process is wonderful. Its all fantastic until the iron gate closes behind you and the room goes on fire.
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
> You're going to integrate your code into their proprietary platform, so they need the integration to be as straight forward as possible. Thus an SPA is a very good candidate. This makes no sense.
isaacbowen 6y ago
In support of the platform: * I've never had zero options for solving a problem. Ten years ago, I needed to build a customer login system on top of Shopify. (Like, before Shopify had one of its own.) I had enough room to do that in javascript, and it became an app called Gatekeeper. (Today's spiritual successor: Locksmith.) * Whoever works on patterns at Shopify does a really, really good job. They think through things slowly and thoroughly, resulting in resource models that that are usually refined over time, instead of remodeled entirely. This is a good sign. * This is a second bullet point to underscore the previous point about Shopify's pattern-making. I've been on this platform for a decade straight, and I don't deal with systemic inconsistency. I'm only here because Shopify is really, really good at patterns. * This is a third pattern-related point to observe that Shopify usually defers solving a problem, rather than putting forward a fragile or brittle solution. (How long did it take for order editing to arrive?) By my reading, they'd rather take a while to land on and deliver a solution that will create a broader future, than more quickly deliver a solution that will limit the future. * Yes, there are occasionally major/breaking API changes. Honestly, I love this. For me, it forces the whole system to stay engaged, and stay alive. Yes, I know the counter-arguments to this. :) This is why I'm still here, ten years later. Yes, some things are short-term hard. But the things that are long-term important are all locked in. --- Also yeah, building and sustaining an app is work. This is part of why I made https://apps.shopify.com/mechanic https://apps.shopify.com/mechanic. I love the Shopify platform, so, so much, and also I needed a way to solve really specific problems more quickly, and keep those solutions running more sustainably. So: platform within a platform. Lots of nested similarity here, in the way that Shopify thinks about solving problems and the way Mechanic thinks about solving problems within Shopify.
- Mavvie 6y ago
  Ah, I was going to build an app just like that! Guess not, anymore. Looks like you took a cool idea and did an awesome job of executing of it!
- stainforth 6y ago
  >Locksmith Are your customers B2B mainly?
mistahenry 6y ago
I recently got an app on to the Shopify app store. The review process is the worst that I've been through. My rejections in chronological order: 1. Rejected for having text in the app icon. The text was our company's name and is our logo which we had to change for Shopify... 2. Rejected because we didn't implement the GDPR webhooks. We don't operate in Europe so I didn't think they apply. I could have read this in the documentation but still... 3. My shop set up geographic restrictions for a few South East Asian countries and the shopify tester tested with a store with an Albania as the country, USD as the currency, and a fictional address. Shopify actually prevents this kind of invalid installation (that's the whole point of the geographic restriction). So when my store rejected his onboarding attempt with a generic error due to what was previously thought to be nothing more than a sanity check, he rejected my app and imposed a 2 week ban on my partner account from resubmitting. Ultimately, I was able to appeal the decision through a different channel. We had our first customer waiting to use our app so this added an extra 10 days of delay and a whole bunch of unneeded stress in my startup.
- flycatcha 6y ago
  I think I remember seeing your thread (and responding to it). That sucks.
tlarkworthy 6y ago
The Checkout thing is a con that prevents fairly run of the mill stuff like conversion tracking sigh
kmeisthax 6y ago
>Integration with the shop frontend is difficult if you're not making a theme As someone on the opposite end of this problem (I'm in custom theme development), the client wanting to install a new app is an immediate source of frustration for reasons almost completely out of your or their control. If your app just gives us a manual install option, that's usually the best solution for me. I can make judgments as a developer as how best to incorporate your app into my theme. Furthermore, because I'm doing it manually, I get to follow all of my version control and testing practices. You see, Shopify actually promotes some very terrible development practices (not your fault). I have to avoid that by working in development themes, storing all my code in a self-hosted Git repository elsewhere, tagging all my production deploys, and using Git to tell me what files have been changed so I can be ultra-conservative in my deploys. Why do I need to do that? Well... Some apps have automatic installers, which try to guess what theme you're using and then install files as they wish to the current production theme. Not only is that dangerous (what if the app breaks something?), even if the app does install correctly; it usually doesn't hit the developer themes and any developer working out of the Git tree is now working with stale files. I have to pull theme exports and compare changes to reverse-engineer what was added so that we don't wind up accidentally uninstalling half the app when we change a product template or something. Part of the problem is that Shopify is specifically designed to be both "easy to use" and give it's merchants a high level of control over their storefront. This precludes a lot of otherwise obvious solutions to this problem, for various reasons: 1. You can't use Git as a deployment mechanism because it has a terrible UX and most new merchants aren't going to figure out how to use it. Even with a non-terrible UX you still need to educate users about it's various failure modes, including merge conflicts and the like. 2. It would be nice to have standard extension points between app and theme developers, but that winds up tying the hands of both a little. Part of the problem is that any level of extensibility also either takes things out of the hands of theme developers, or requires new users understand how to implement the component. I was hoping something like the new section system (which I haven't gotten a chance to play around yet) would fix this for app developers. If Shopify was willing to go a little bit up-market (and, given how they've become the favorite platform of Facebook scammers, they should) they could fix these problems by offering ways for theme and app developers to agree on specific extension points. This kind of ruins the whole "just edit this template to get a thing on your theme" aspect of it, but Shopify's really outgrowing what it started with IMHO. (By the way, there's a special circle of hell reserved for page builder apps that store everything in the current production theme. I recently had to deal with a client whose shop no longer allowed them to clone their main template as it was full of literally hundreds of templates and assets from this one app. After literal hours of manual garbage collection, I was able to get it to the point where a theme clone merely took 20 minutes rather than failing outright.)
flycatcha 6y ago
To the OP, they do provide the raw HTML to Polaris Components (this is what I use -- I don't know React). Not sure if that's the same as HTML "components" though.
matt_f 6y ago
Are there any viable alternatives to shopify for developers that don't have these issues?

366 points by Dragony 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Shopify 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.

harlanlewis 6y ago
> 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.
- iamdbtoo 6y ago
  Not OP, and I don't know if you've ever worked within Shopify, but the developer experience is generally terrible. They've given up supporting most of their own tools and basically just tell you to work within their site admin IDE which is also lacking in many ways.
dubcanada 6y ago
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.
- colesantiago 6y ago
  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.
  - Cerium 6y ago
    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.
    - bombcar 6y ago
      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.
      - base 6y ago
        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.
        nucleardog 6y ago
        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.
drchiu 6y ago
Subscriptions is now available as part of their API. It does require a bit of time* to understand it though. * - May vary depending on your level of experience with GraphQL
- colesantiago 6y ago
  *API But not natively within Shopify's UI, You have to use 3rd party apps have to make use of this API. For merchants this is useless to them if they don't want to use a 3rd party app for this feature.
- colinloretz 6y ago
  We just built our own subscriptions on the Subscription API and it is extremely thin. Just a few gripes that I had to build around: 1. The "SubscriptionContract" isn't much of a contract at all. You can set a subscription to cancelled but still bill against it for example. 2. It keeps track of a "next billing date" but it does not bill the customer for you like Stripe does, you have to keep track of the next billing date and attempt to bill against the contract yourself.
  - colesantiago 6y ago
    Is this subscription api suitable for digital only businesses that have say a membership system?. Last time I checked most of the shopify apps out there are not suited to this.
    - colinloretz 6y ago
      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 specific questions you might have.
      - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
LargeWu 6y ago
They integrate with a lot of payment gateways, even if Stripe isn't one of them. https://www.shopify.com/payment-gateways/united-states https://www.shopify.com/payment-gateways/united-states
- colesantiago 6y ago
  Have to admit, while this is good and reassuring for accepting worldwide payments, Shopify is no good on the subscriptions front and this is very poor if your subscriptions business is digital, like a membership system.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Is Gumroad a better fit perhaps for this use case?
    - colesantiago 6y ago
      Gumroad looks cool, but the percentages they are taking are extortionate, not sure if they are better. It would get to a point where I am giving thousands of pounds to Gumroad to lock myself in. How customisable is it, can it do Apple / Google Pay?
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Not sure if it does mobile payments natively. Depending on your content, Ghost [1] might be another option with a more palatable cost. [1] https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
- SahAssar 6y ago
  In that case they still take 2% which is pretty absurd.
mingabunga 6y ago
Agree. Started off using it because everyone is and it's quick to get going and setup a store, but as soon as you do any custom stuff it's a nightmare. We eventually ran in to a problem where any site updates wouldn't save, and there's no way to debug anything. We'd started to move to bigcommerce so that just accelerated it. Bigcommerce is more flexible but settings all over the place.

donutdan4114 6y ago

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 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.

mehphp 6y ago
I had the same issue with rate limiting and they doubled mine just by asking. YMMV
- Axsuul 6y ago
  Doubled it on just your store or for every store you integrate with?

dubcanada 6y ago

Polaris does have a CSS file - https://github.com/Shopify/polaris-react#using-the-css-components 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.

deedubaya 6y ago

I'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?

drchiu 6y ago
Yes, this is true. There's a lot of pressure, I suspect, since they've come out as a publicly traded company. I've built on Shopify before. While they're great, you'll find that it's hard to grow your company in it (save for a few notable exceptions). And then there's the platform dependent nature of it all. I would not build a business on top of another company's platform.
boringg 6y ago
They did that for a couple developer companies that were intentionally not paying their rev-share agreement. There was an article on HN about it recently. It made sense that they would take down bad actors in the community.
JaggedJax 6y ago
Their terms seem a little unclear to me, but it seems that they claim they are due a percentage of anything you charge a customer who uses your Shopify app, even if you don't bill extra for use of that app. However in practice I have found Shopify not too strict about fees charged outside of Shopify. I suppose if you were actually charging your customers specifically for the app but doing it outside Shopify to avoid the cut they would come after you. I find BigCommerce a worse offender here. They copied Shopify's terms and constantly hound you asking for a cut of money even if you offer a free plugin with your standard service. Their method of collecting this info is also arcane, manual, and threatening. I would drop BigCommerce support in a second if they challenged us on this. So far they have backed down when we tell them we don't charge extra specifically for BigCommerce. But they still hound us monthly to submit a $0 report.

trutannus 6y ago

I 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.

isoskeles 6y ago

Maybe not that helpful of an addition, but the most surprising thing I found was that Shopify has an option for an "app proxy", in which you can have some separate, custom web server that gets proxied through your Shopify store. I've used this to some success in building a more robust product customization app (with functionality very specific to our business), more so than what I could find on their store. The biggest con for using the app proxy is around authentication. You can't do much special stuff with auth, basically the simplest option is to just wrap your proxied pages in a liquid check for customer.id. (Although, I can see this as a pro rather than a con, as it forces you to keep the proxy app simple.) My biggest worry is one day Shopify just decides to discontinue app proxies. It doesn't seem like an option they try to point developers toward, so I don't trust it and am thinking about building on top of their API to avoid this.

drchiu 6y ago

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. - Customers use the app review system to hold developer hostage for feature requests. "Create this feature for us and I'll edit my review." - Shopify's customer service reps says, "It must be the app that's causing this." Reading the CSR's emails, it is clear that this person does not understand the (technical) issues and is only trying to close the ticket. Customer takes what the CSR says as gospel and you, as the developer, spends a lot of time trying to fight that mindset. I can't help but feel a big part of Shopify's early strategy was that the demographic of customers they were trying to attract just weren't a great type of customer, and that the partner program allowed them to enlist a lot of hungry developers willing to work for free (or next to nothing). There is definitely room for improvement. I have mixed feelings about it, as their ecosystem provided me with a way to make a living many years ago. I don't depend on them anymore, but I wouldn't argue against trying your luck out there if you're starting out. Just recognize that there is a certain culture and way of practice there.

iamdbtoo 6y ago
This is similar my experience with making Shopify themes. It definitely feels like the third-parties that support the platform are not really considered. The developer experience is generally terrible and there's little incentive to change it because the developer isn't Shopify's customer, that would be the shop owner.
jakear 6y ago
> Customers use the app review system to hold developer hostage for feature requests. "Create this feature for us and I'll edit my review." To be fair this is pretty reasonable. Lets say 5 stars is highly recommend, 4 is recommend, 3 is neutral. If you’re building a new feature and it wouldn’t change anyone from being neutral about the product to recommending it, or from recommending the product to highly recommending it, maybe rethink building that feature.

LMYahooTFY 6y ago

So I appear to be on a Shopify black list. I've called them, my bank, and on a few occasions even tried other people's cards. I'm declined no matter what, by Shopify. It's been this way for well over a year. Sometimes retailers will manually process a transaction, but otherwise it's infuriating for me to see Shopify grow in the market.

tyingq 6y ago
You can see some of the indicators they use here: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/orders/fraud-analysis#fraud-analysis-indicators https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/orders/fraud-analysis#fra... The thing where it calculates ip geolocation distance from the shipping address is a potential culprit. Maybe your IP address has a bad entry in their ip geo mapping software. They also don't like proxies and VPNs.
ganeshkrishnan 6y ago
anything to do with marijuana, they will ban you because they are processed by stripe and american company

danpalmer 6y ago

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 dynamic list of supported API versions. If the version you've hard-coded in your app (because it's what you support) is no longer in that list, it will raise a VersionNotFoundError and your app will probably fail in some significant way. - There's no connection persistence. Every API call sets up and tears down a full connection, a noticeable performance impact. - Internally the library uses a lot of global state, it's certainly not safe to use in async code – too easy to use the wrong credentials on a request – and I suspect it's also not thread safe. - Despite having something called a Session, very similar in documentation to a requests.Session or httpx.Session, it's neither, it's just a container for some creds. No sessions are available at all. - It's mostly a wrapper around Pyactiveresource, which appears to have a lot of similar issues – internal state that's hidden that causes things to not work as you expect. I suspect that the Python library was developed by Ruby engineers, some of the practices are things I've seen in Ruby but that just don't fit into the Python ecosystem. From what I can tell their API deprecation strategy is quite hostile to developers. I think it would be difficult to build what I'd consider to be production-grade services on top of the library. This is in stark contrast to others such as Stripe's API/libraries which are fantastic.

drchiu 6y ago
> 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.
- bartread 6y ago
  Well, yeah, but why do they need to make changes to their API so frequently? This is both developer and business hostile. I get extremely pissy when paying for a service where the provider regularly dumps non-value-adding work into my product backlog that sucks up time I could invest in more valuable areas.

brunojppb 6y ago

I share some of the pains the author raises. One major thing that is a bit discouraging is the inconsistent feature support they have between REST and GraphQL APIs. Neither of them cover all functionalities, so sometimes you have to be bouncing back and forth between REST and GraphQL. On the other hand, they are doing an amazing job and constantly providing updates. Their docs are really good and improving everyday. Kudos to the shopify dev team.

nsomaru 6y ago
Curious as to why this is being downvoted? Could down voters please share their views?

picodguyo 6y ago

Ugh, I can so relate to this right now. I followed their Node embedded app tutorial closely, submitted my app, then found out they no longer allow embedded apps to use cookies like their tutorial does. Finding up to date documentation is a struggle and some of the components they suggest you use are closed source and completely undocumented.

flycatcha 6y ago
I had previously built a rails app using Shopify CLI and it failed review due to some endless cookies loop that I could not reproduce caused by their gem. In the end, I just rolled my own OAuth / user database / Billing - but talk about a waste of time.

hahahahe 6y ago

I just don’t get why people continue to build around Shopify. Is Stripe/Square not good enough? Don’t you save a ton by forgoing Shopify?

arkitaip 6y ago
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.
- hahahahe 6y ago
  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.
  - arkitaip 6y ago
    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.
    - 6510 6y ago
      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?
      - 6510 6y ago
        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.

stickfigure 6y ago

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 all the details about how those fields are supposed to work. Example: A Fulfillment has a tracking_numbers array, but there doesn't seem to be any way to add multiple tracking numbers. The docs are silent, and questions about this in the support channels remain unanswered. For years. * There are two completely different APIs (graphql and REST), which do not have equal capabilities. If Shopify is planning on deprecating one of them, they should give us guidance. * The API is inconsistent. I count at least FIVE different representations of an Address structure, each slightly different for no apparent reason. Eg "country" vs "countryCode". This is the kind of thing that creeps into projects in dynamic languages when nobody's paying attention. * There's a lot of overengineered stuff. The Metadata API is really unpleasant compared to Stripe's simpler approach. * There's no way to set up common shipping scenarios like "$N for first item, $M for each additional". I could go on. But I will say this: It's better than Etsy's API. Though Etsy is finally working on it again, so maybe that will change.

theturtletalks 6y ago
Hey, I'm building an e-commerce operations platform that let's you connect any e-commerce platform to fulfillment and 3PL platforms. We're integrating with Printly and the like right now. Is there an API for your platform yet?
- stickfigure 6y ago
  Yes, although you'll probably find that we are not an obvious fit for that model. Company info is in my profile.
disantlor 6y ago
There are definitely several ways to set up complex Shopify shipping situations. My livelihood is in good part based on it.

lawwantsin17 6y ago

Shopify is API garbage. I can't believe these idiots are eating e-commerce.

darepublic 6y ago

What does Shopify offer that a stripe integration doesn't?

paultannenbaum 6y ago
Apples to Oranges. Shopify allows non devs to easily set up an ecommerce store, that is their biggest value add. Things like inventory management, shipping, site hosting etc.

moron4hire 6y ago

> To my surprise every 10 refreshes or so, I would get a 404 error. For the hardcoded resource no less! It's frustrating to work with an API that already seems unreliable when testing locally. Google actively does this with many of their APIs. Running locally, their APIs will be very unreliable. Once you're live on the domain you've configured, everything is much more reliable. I don't know if they do it to force you to consider cases where the API returns errors, or if it's some kind of anti-scraping provision, but it can be extremely confusing and frustrating if it's your first time working with the API and you're not sure how things are going to actually work (if at all!) when you deploy.

JRGC 6y ago

+1 on page layout

bookmarkable 6y ago

I'd be curious if any of the Shopify app devs in this thread have an opinion on how they handle customer data. As a Shopify store owner, I was aghast how common it was on the platform to require allowing third party apps entirely too much information about my end customers. I was very uncomfortable leaving some otherwise promising apps installed in my store, and eventually gave up on Shopify entirely.

moneywoes 6y ago
What did you move to?

yowlingcat 6y ago

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. What I am trying to figure out is if Shopify is "bad" or just "warty" -- I realize that is subjective and heavily depends on what one is trying to use it for, but it's still a challenge to reason about.

jconley 6y ago
We use a forked and heavily modified Saleor at Brava (https://www.brava.com 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 wanted to sell things I'd personally use Shopify or Webflow or such.
- intermiras 6y ago
  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.
  - yowlingcat 6y ago
    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!

that_guy_iain 6y ago

I built a shopify app for my ecommerce monitoring system and my system is mostly written in PHP I have some Go and Python for various stuff by the core is in PHP mainly because I think PHP is really good language for web apps, it's designed for it, literally. I went to use the Shopify php library and it's literally dead, I looked at the issues and there was a Shopify employee advising people to use an unoffical one that basically supports everything. It's cool the employee pointed people in the right direction but I think it's a sad state of affairs that one of the most popular web programming languages in the word has no support from them. Also, the reason people can't use Shopify with my system yet is that even to be approved for an unlisited application you need to allow for account creation via Shopify. I understand for listed apps in the store but if I want to have an app where they click a button on my site and I connect to their shopify system and get data I still need to support this feature I won't use. That saddened me. I just need to create time to allow for account creation via their app store and figure out what that means getting the info and how to handle user confirmation if at all. (Shameless plug - https://www.ootliers.com https://www.ootliers.com)

xal 6y ago

Lots of really fair feedback here. We hear you.

jloveless 6y ago
There's also a lack of communication with the dev partners in general (e.g. the recent Service Worker issues). Building up a more robust partner program with (perhaps) a different support team could be really helpful.
ghostapps 6y ago
Developer of Simple Purchase Orders here https://apps.shopify.com/simple-po https://apps.shopify.com/simple-po This is the best bit of developing for Shopify imo, this is the CEO reading the comments and taking them on board. So here are some more! Good - Partner support isn't great, however, if you can figure out how to get to a named employee, which is quite easy with their Slack for partners, they are super helpful. Just this week I am migrating to React and Polaris (mostly due to third party cookies being blocked by browsers and having to move to JWTs for auth). I had a niche problem that I dreaded going through support with, so I posted in the relevant Slack channel and a dev got in touch and fixed it for me in minutes. Bad - 20% commission is starting to look expensive now Google and Apple have dropped their fees - They only pay out in dollars to PayPal which results in a 3% fee for non-US (and Canada?) devs since December - Python API is not kept up to date - There have been numerous copycat apps that the original devs have had to kick up a huge fuss to remove Thanks to @donutdan and this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149528 for originally introducing me to Shopify Apps nearly 4 years ago, its been fun
diweirich 6y ago
Would love to see the online store design experience released. Just throwing that out there. Excited to explore the possibilities.
ascorbic 6y ago
CORS support in the predictive search API please, or better search in the Storefront API.
6y ago

intrasight 6y ago

I read "Shopify App" as one that clones/competes with Shopify. I prefer "app that uses Shopify"

paultannenbaum 6y ago
Shopify has an app store, similar to apple's app store. This is what the article is referring to.
- intrasight 6y ago
  I didn't know that it had gone from being a payment API to a developer platform.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sarabad2021 6y ago

Biggest issue I'm dealing with is their integrated iframe app view and trying to persist a session since cross-site cookies are being blocked more and more. For instance Safari now blocks them by default and Chrome announced they are doing the same. That means when the user logs in via the frame, you can't set a cookie or add a jwt to the localstorage. All blocked and there are no workarounds. Awesome.

code_duck 6y ago

This is a familiar struggle, as far as the concepts. I did a rather similar project based on Etsy about 10 years ago. We made a javascript-invoked widget (probably an iframe IIR), intended to be embedded onto blogs and webpages with a single line of code. This gathered a lot of data from Etsy. Shop details, items for sale, feedback, favoriters. Somewhere there's an article on the Etsy blog, but if curious you can check out this blog article. http://happycloudmoments.blogspot.com/2010/07/craftcult-introduces-pocket-shop-widget.html http://happycloudmoments.blogspot.com/2010/07/craftcult-intr... At the time I already had a popular site based on their API. I had noticed that in general, it's a tough business to be a disconnected 3rd party developing on a closed platform. You're at the whim of the platform owner, slave to their intentions and decisions, good or bad. It's like having a remote job where nobody talks to you. I got over API unreliability with a system to retry calls a few times. Etsy API calls could fail in several distinct ways, so my parser had a lot of stages (check for HTTP status, parse for certain strings, check if it's empty or an empty string, so forth). The calls also occasionally took much longer than usual. I implemented a caching system for the widgets. It sounds like Shopify reliability is much worse than Etsy's at the time. Other than outages, I believe we'd get about 2% of calls failing for different reasons, which would usually work on a retry. Changes were difficult to deal with because they could come suddenly. The worst ones were breaking changes that apparently Etsy was unaware of. I'd start getting errors and have no idea if it was a bug or an intentional change, and write workarounds only for them to fix the bug a few days later. We also experienced the removal of features with other apps. Or, one time we spent a couple months on a feature and then it turned out Etsy had been working on the same thing themselves.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

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?

jeromegv 6y ago
At the end of the day, the customer is the one deciding what they will pay for based on what is available to them. Majority of apps are on Shopify. Customer has no knowledge of the dev tools and how hard they are to use.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  Yes and no. The issue here is presenting as "dev friendly" and not being true to that. Wix, Webflow, Squrespace don't do that. They're not. But Shopify wants to say one thing but do another. Why do devs subject themselves to a platform with well known limitations. Note: I like Shopify. But only for cases that are within its sweet spot.
base 6y ago
There are a lot of options in e-commerce, all of them with thousands of shops: WooCommerce, Magento, Jumpseller, Bigcommerce, Prestashop, Wix WooCommerce etc...
6510 6y ago
> How did Shopify get to be the beast that it is? Its amazingly simple to get started. It will push the products into a shoppingCart array, do the arithmetic adding up the prices. Clearly not something you should pay for. It's one hell of a deal - for them. I'm sure there is a special place in hell for self proclaimed developers who want to help shopify create a playstore/appstore like monopoly. I'm happy they are this terrible at everything nice. But the getting started process is wonderful. Its all fantastic until the iron gate closes behind you and the room goes on fire.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago

> You're going to integrate your code into their proprietary platform, so they need the integration to be as straight forward as possible. Thus an SPA is a very good candidate. This makes no sense.

isaacbowen 6y ago

In support of the platform: * I've never had zero options for solving a problem. Ten years ago, I needed to build a customer login system on top of Shopify. (Like, before Shopify had one of its own.) I had enough room to do that in javascript, and it became an app called Gatekeeper. (Today's spiritual successor: Locksmith.) * Whoever works on patterns at Shopify does a really, really good job. They think through things slowly and thoroughly, resulting in resource models that that are usually refined over time, instead of remodeled entirely. This is a good sign. * This is a second bullet point to underscore the previous point about Shopify's pattern-making. I've been on this platform for a decade straight, and I don't deal with systemic inconsistency. I'm only here because Shopify is really, really good at patterns. * This is a third pattern-related point to observe that Shopify usually defers solving a problem, rather than putting forward a fragile or brittle solution. (How long did it take for order editing to arrive?) By my reading, they'd rather take a while to land on and deliver a solution that will create a broader future, than more quickly deliver a solution that will limit the future. * Yes, there are occasionally major/breaking API changes. Honestly, I love this. For me, it forces the whole system to stay engaged, and stay alive. Yes, I know the counter-arguments to this. :) This is why I'm still here, ten years later. Yes, some things are short-term hard. But the things that are long-term important are all locked in. --- Also yeah, building and sustaining an app is work. This is part of why I made https://apps.shopify.com/mechanic https://apps.shopify.com/mechanic. I love the Shopify platform, so, so much, and also I needed a way to solve really specific problems more quickly, and keep those solutions running more sustainably. So: platform within a platform. Lots of nested similarity here, in the way that Shopify thinks about solving problems and the way Mechanic thinks about solving problems within Shopify.

Mavvie 6y ago
Ah, I was going to build an app just like that! Guess not, anymore. Looks like you took a cool idea and did an awesome job of executing of it!
stainforth 6y ago
>Locksmith Are your customers B2B mainly?

mistahenry 6y ago

I recently got an app on to the Shopify app store. The review process is the worst that I've been through. My rejections in chronological order: 1. Rejected for having text in the app icon. The text was our company's name and is our logo which we had to change for Shopify... 2. Rejected because we didn't implement the GDPR webhooks. We don't operate in Europe so I didn't think they apply. I could have read this in the documentation but still... 3. My shop set up geographic restrictions for a few South East Asian countries and the shopify tester tested with a store with an Albania as the country, USD as the currency, and a fictional address. Shopify actually prevents this kind of invalid installation (that's the whole point of the geographic restriction). So when my store rejected his onboarding attempt with a generic error due to what was previously thought to be nothing more than a sanity check, he rejected my app and imposed a 2 week ban on my partner account from resubmitting. Ultimately, I was able to appeal the decision through a different channel. We had our first customer waiting to use our app so this added an extra 10 days of delay and a whole bunch of unneeded stress in my startup.

flycatcha 6y ago
I think I remember seeing your thread (and responding to it). That sucks.

tlarkworthy 6y ago

The Checkout thing is a con that prevents fairly run of the mill stuff like conversion tracking sigh

kmeisthax 6y ago

>Integration with the shop frontend is difficult if you're not making a theme As someone on the opposite end of this problem (I'm in custom theme development), the client wanting to install a new app is an immediate source of frustration for reasons almost completely out of your or their control. If your app just gives us a manual install option, that's usually the best solution for me. I can make judgments as a developer as how best to incorporate your app into my theme. Furthermore, because I'm doing it manually, I get to follow all of my version control and testing practices. You see, Shopify actually promotes some very terrible development practices (not your fault). I have to avoid that by working in development themes, storing all my code in a self-hosted Git repository elsewhere, tagging all my production deploys, and using Git to tell me what files have been changed so I can be ultra-conservative in my deploys. Why do I need to do that? Well... Some apps have automatic installers, which try to guess what theme you're using and then install files as they wish to the current production theme. Not only is that dangerous (what if the app breaks something?), even if the app does install correctly; it usually doesn't hit the developer themes and any developer working out of the Git tree is now working with stale files. I have to pull theme exports and compare changes to reverse-engineer what was added so that we don't wind up accidentally uninstalling half the app when we change a product template or something. Part of the problem is that Shopify is specifically designed to be both "easy to use" and give it's merchants a high level of control over their storefront. This precludes a lot of otherwise obvious solutions to this problem, for various reasons: 1. You can't use Git as a deployment mechanism because it has a terrible UX and most new merchants aren't going to figure out how to use it. Even with a non-terrible UX you still need to educate users about it's various failure modes, including merge conflicts and the like. 2. It would be nice to have standard extension points between app and theme developers, but that winds up tying the hands of both a little. Part of the problem is that any level of extensibility also either takes things out of the hands of theme developers, or requires new users understand how to implement the component. I was hoping something like the new section system (which I haven't gotten a chance to play around yet) would fix this for app developers. If Shopify was willing to go a little bit up-market (and, given how they've become the favorite platform of Facebook scammers, they should) they could fix these problems by offering ways for theme and app developers to agree on specific extension points. This kind of ruins the whole "just edit this template to get a thing on your theme" aspect of it, but Shopify's really outgrowing what it started with IMHO. (By the way, there's a special circle of hell reserved for page builder apps that store everything in the current production theme. I recently had to deal with a client whose shop no longer allowed them to clone their main template as it was full of literally hundreds of templates and assets from this one app. After literal hours of manual garbage collection, I was able to get it to the point where a theme clone merely took 20 minutes rather than failing outright.)

flycatcha 6y ago

To the OP, they do provide the raw HTML to Polaris Components (this is what I use -- I don't know React). Not sure if that's the same as HTML "components" though.

matt_f 6y ago

Are there any viable alternatives to shopify for developers that don't have these issues?