Integrating Shopify Store Apps

[gottagocode]

Hello everyone,

I have been building headless storefronts via Gatsby / Shopify for the past year now, and one of our biggest pain points is integrating apps that our clients are seeing on the Shopify app store. Things like Gorgias, Recharge subscriptions, cart upsells, etc that are usually just one-click installs for stores leveraging a Shopify theme, turn into major pain points trying to integrate all the different APIs for each, and in the end, they never play nice with another. Im currently building a test theme with the Hydrogren framework to see if this will be solution to the above issues we have faced in the past. I'm curious if anyone has any information on how Shopify-store-apps will integrate with hydrogen themes. It would be great if a plugins/apps folder would populate in the code base similar to that of a woocommerce/wordpress theme. Just curious, thank you for any insight!

[jplhomer]

Hi there!

Right now, Hydrogen will interact with apps through APIs similar to how you'd interact with them in Gatsby.

However, I'm intrigued by what you said here:

It would be great if a plugins/apps folder would populate in the code base similar to that of a woocommerce/wordpress theme.

Could you expand upon that with a use case or an example?

We're definitely exploring ways to make third-party integrations easier in Hydrogen.

[gottagocode]

@jplhomer of course, I can think of a couple of examples. Ideally, when I install an application on the app store, the code for that app would be injected into my project similar to how it is injected into liquid.

Example: We have a client who wants to use Gorgias live chat, It would be so incredible if the app code for this would be injected into my project upon adding the app in the Shopify admin. Right now certain apps like that just have no API support so it's impossible to be used.

Example2: Recharge Subscriptions. Currently, if I want to add subscriptions to a theme, it just attaches a "one-time purchase or recurring purchase" widget to the theme and then you are good to go. The headless implementation of this requires using an API to get selling plans from recharge, then mapping them to our products, checking to see if the current product selling_plan matches a recharge selling_plan, and so on... You can see the lift becomes very heavy, but fortunately headless is still very fast so not complaining here. I just think that ease of use for both client and developer could occur from a more plug and play functionality on 3rd party apps. It would allow clients to take more control, and give the developer more room for overhead.

Thanks for hearing my concerns, I'm super excited to build with Hydrogen. If anything, it will solve a lot of previous issues that would arise for us with cart-persistence and user persistence.

[morganmccunn]

Hey @gottagocode - I agree this is the ideal scenario to have an experience where you can install an app from the app store and developers don't have to determine how to integrate it with their storefronts, there is much more guidance around this and it's easily achieved. We're working on ways to get closer to this but seeing as each app is so different, it will take some time! There is also the aspect, as you mentioned, of apps that do not yet have APIs available publicly for integration - this is also on the radar. No clear solution to share with you yet, but really appreciate the input!