Learnings from Working with Shopify API
Learnings from Working with Shopify API
Shopify is a leading provider of fully managed eCommerce solutions. It provides a great selling experience to its users. Not only the selling experience is excellent, but Shopify provides a rich set of APIs. That allowed the growth of its developer community creating integrations to integrate Shopify with almost any cloud platform you can imagine. We had a chance to work with Shopify API recently & we learned some essential things from it, which are mentioned below.
Real Looking SandBox Stores :
Shopify provides its developers with a seamless development experience. It gives unlimited Sandbox stores that include all the functionalities of Shopify for free of cost. So developers can simply signup for a free account at the Shopify developer portal. Afterward, they can create as many as Sandbox stores to test their integration with.
Detailed Product Management API’s:
Shopify includes every possible product management API you can think of, far more than its competitors. You can not only create a product inside Shopify, but it also allows you to set the product’s metadata too. You can have an SEO title & description of that product, which is very helpful for sellers.
Out of the Box Custom Field Support :
Shopify allows developers to associate as much custom data to its products. That makes it much easier for developers to build multichannel integrations around it. In our case, we had to filter out certain products based on their metadata value before creating them on another channel. Therefore, Shopify Meta field API was of great help to us.
Detailed Inventory & Location management API :
Our customer, for whom we were developing the Shopify integration, had multiple product locations & they wanted to maintain the same inventory distribution over Shopify. With the inventory & location management features, we were able to achieve this for our users.
Out of the Box MultiChannel Support :
If you are looking to sell on multiple platforms & using Shopify as your PIM, you can easily do so by using Shopify Sales Channel API.
Detailed order & fulfillment API :
Our customer wanted to sell products he already had on Shopify on another marketplace. However, he wanted to keep the fulfillment via Shopify since he already connected his Shopify store to various shipping careers. We were able to achieve it quickly by using orders API & fulfillment API. Orders API helped us create orders back to Shopify from another platform. Once fulfilled via Shopify, we got a Webhooks notification. We used it then to notify the customers on another platform about their shipment status.
Webhooks notifications: Webhooks notifications are the superpower of Shopify. It helped us to perform various operations like inventory updates, and fulfillment updates in real-time. However, when you use Shopify Webhooks, you need to be careful because sometimes they get removed if you don’t respond to webhooks within 5 seconds. So you need to be a bit creative to perform real-time operations using Shopify webhooks.