How To Create a Shopify App

Shopify is a cloud-based SaaS (software-as-a-service) that provides eCommerce destinations with answers. With this, you can build a fully modified website with topics and applications all over that are built to quickly start your business without finding out how to code by any stretch of the imagination.

You will have access to an administrator board with a mandatory month to month fee, where you can store details, products, and procedure orders.

One of the most important highlights of Shopify is that your membership provides a stable, strong facilitator for your website. During high traffic or programmer problems, you won’t need to panic about the site’s crash.

In addition, Shopify provides every minute of daily customer service through telephone, email, live chat. These days, they are one of the most trusted phases of eCommerce and buying from a Shopify store is exceptionally protected. So to begin your company with the stage, you are in appropriate hands.

Basic, Shopify, and Advanced are the three most conventional designs for Shopify. The comprehensive pricing and features on Shopify or our full 2020 Shopify audit can be reviewed.

Written in Ruby and developed by Shopify, Liquid is an open-source template language. It is the Shopify theme’s backbone and has been commonly used to load interactive content on storefronts.

One reason we have a knee-jerk reaction to bizarre requests sometimes is because we can get trapped in our own comfort zone. If all you do is build Shopify Themes to solve customer issues, that’s what you’re going to aim for. Any request outside of that can create stress and difficulty for you.

The same goes for back-end designers, front-end developers, and everyone else who has acquired technical expertise.

Our natural reaction is to look for our well-worn instrument to solve the dilemma of the client. We don’t even know of a better tool out there sometimes,

Isn’t software development hard?

But it’s difficult to build custom apps, right? Don’t they take a team of developers and create it for a long time?

We all know at least one person who has been working on their app concept for months or years, an app they expect to release next month (although the next month has been rescheduled every month for the past 10 months…).

There’s another example of a single developer creating and shipping something quickly over a few nights and weekends for every case of a professional team that takes months to create an app. Often, even for as little as a week.

The method that I used to build Dripify from scratch:

While Dripify was a public app listed in the app store, it is possible to create private apps for your customers using this exact same method. As an example, the advantage of using this public app is that I can be much more transparent about every step in the process.

I had worked on client applications before when I got started with Dripify, so I knew a little about Shopify’s APIs. The difference was that all those applications were current apps, and I was developing a functioning codebase or rehabbing it.

I had to start off from scratch with Dripify. From authentication and payments to the user interface, I had to build and own every aspect of it.

I set up a challenge for myself to top it all off. I will devote a single work week to the growth of Dripify and have it launched by Friday afternoon, feature complete, and ready to be installed by merchants.

Build your list of features:

You need to brainstorm what features to create after you have defined the intent of your app. Write down every idea you have at this point, using all of the references you can find. Don’t restrict yourself or think about your timetable. You want as many ideas as you can get, without even concentrating on their consistency.

It’s time to assess once you have a list of features and are done brainstorming. Compare each definition to the function of your app, and only retain the ones that serve that purpose.

Remember, something tiny and minimal is something you like. After the first version is installed, you can still come back later and extend the app’s feature list.

For clients, I like to frame this as a minimal Step One. The first version won’t be perfect, but it’ll give consumers some value faster by making them use it now, instead of the whole thing in six months. The client learns every time I do this that there is simply no need for some of their ‘must have’ characteristics that have been transferred to phase two.

The development phase:

Setting up authentication for the app.

I was prepared to begin creation with a couple of off-the-shelf instruments in hand.

Integration with the authentication and authorization system of Shopify is the first thing all app developers need to do. The shopify app library helps with this, but you do need to do quite a bit of setup and checking.

There are two approaches for authentication/authorization that Shopify uses:

Private App, or OAuth Key to the API and password

OAuth is used by all users in the public app store and offers a convenient and secure way for a retailer to allow Shopify for your app without giving their store the username and password of your app.

Every shop, on the other hand, has the ability to build private apps, including an API key and password. These applications, like a standard username and password with the API, use the API key and password and get full access to the store from which they come.

Getting OAuth to work:

When you use OAuth, the scopes are one configuration you want to get correct. A scope is what is used by Shopify to allow you to access unique APIs. For instance, if you need to process orders, then you would want the scope of reading orders. You would want both read-customer and write-customer scopes to add new customers.

If you don’t choose the correct scopes, when attempting to access them, you’ll have trouble later on. It’s not fun to find out why an API doesn’t work, especially when you forgot to add the scope for it days (or weeks) ago.

With Dripify, I knew that in order to instal Drip for my clients, I would only need to access two scopes. One scope for reading the templates of the style, and one scope for writing back those templates.

After setting up and running my OAuth setup, I was ready to work on the actual app features.

Integrating with the API for Drip:

With this renewed focus, I knew I needed to make the snippet install simple. Luckily, installing Drip is a simple process (it’s just a piece of JavaScript you add to every page, similar to Google Analytics), though I did need to include the Drip account ID in the snippet.

I could ask the merchant to log into Drip, find their account ID, and have them copy it into Dripify. That would work, and it would make my job simple.

But there’s a lot that could go wrong with that. Plus, it’s not really user-friendly to ask merchants to login to another site, and copy data manually. Remember, the purpose of this app was to let users ‘easily set up their Drip account.’

I decided to stick with my plan and try to do it automatically.

Like Shopify, Drip also uses OAuth to allow apps to access an account’s information. This meant I could set up Drip’s OAuth, and get access to what I needed for the merchant.

Lara is a Managing Editor working in Germany. She writes on the history of the internet, technologies facing users, and social networks. In the world-renowned Disrupt conference & flagship meeting, You can recall her from her appearances hosting the event and moderating the panels and fireside chats.

She is now a Managing Editor at the production company for Shopify web apps.