Shopify app ecosystem about to see an upheaval (why I'm getting into app development)
Hey everyone. Curious if anyone could convince me I'm wrong about what I lay out in this post.
I've been lurking the Shopify ecosystem for a long time, and dabbling a little over the years. For several reasons, I've stayed away. But a few recent events have convinced me now is the time for me to get serious about Shopify app development.
The three events/pieces are:
- Deprecation of checkout.liquid (announced in February)
- Shopify Functions (introduced last summer)
- New tooling that makes building apps a lot faster (higher throughput)
The coming ecosystem disruption
My hypothesis is that between Shopify Functions and the deprecation of checkout.liquid there's a massive disruption coming in the Shopify app ecosystem. New apps using the latest Shopify 'functionality' will replace old apps, either by force (deprecation) or by providing better value.
Checkout.liquid deprecation
Tens of thousands of Plus merchants will need to migrate their checkout.liquid implementations to checkout extensions before August 2024. The demand for developers and public + private apps to meet the needs . There's a hard deadline, and plenty of demand that is going to come online as merchants realize that functionality their business is relying on is being deprecated. (see the deprecation announcement)
Shopify Functions, the future of Shopify?
I heard about Functions when they were announced last summer, and figured they were pretty neat. But it wasn't until I read this blog post that the coined drop for me about their importance, and the opportunity. Functions enables developers to write code that is hosted and run on Shopify's infrastructure (for free). Because of that Shopify is comfortable to open up much more functionality that they'd never trust third party apps to run (round trip + compute takes too long to run in e.g. checkout). This opens up completely new opportunities that aren't already covered by existing apps, as well as opportunities that were only available to Plus in the past. Again, there will be demand for a currently non-existent supply of apps.
New tooling
The Functions blog post above is written by a company called Gadget (website), which how I stumbled upon them. I'd best describe Gadget as a "Shopify app backend as a service" (they claim to be an ecom app backend as a service, but only do Shopify right now.. but I digress). Spinning up a hosted app backend with them and installing it on a dev store takes five minutes. In the process, they abstract a bunch of stuff I'd never figure out how to do (webhooks, retry logic, oauth), or that would take me hours (for each app). I've used them for about a two weeks and built a few simple apps to figure out their framework (even stayed within the free tier). Although it took a while to get used to, and the DX isn't always what I'm used to, it's helping me go really fast and do things I couldn't do otherwise. Because they use Node.js I've been using GH copilot to help me with some JS + Shopify code suggestions as well, which helped me go even faster.
The new opportunities + how quickly I think I could be building apps with this tooling has me licking my lips. Back to my original question. Could anyone convince me I'm wrong? What am I missing?
Otherwise I'm about to go down a Shopify app development rabbit hole for the next several months.
Hey, @catalystNewbie pointed me to this post. Super happy to hear you've found Gadget (I work there).
I 110% share your sentiment. We've seen an uptick in interest in both Functions and Checkout extensions from the people we talk to, and I've echoed exactly what you're saying here. It's early days for these new capabilities, and there will be a lot of demand apps built with them.
If you're not 100% familiar with the domain I'd suggest trying out leveraging GPT-X for your builds, see if it helps speed you up solving parts anything. Maybe you can draw inspiration from this IH post [0] where I shared how I did this with a Gadget app build. Shoot me a message here or on our Discord if you need any help.
[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-asked-gpt-4-to-build-a-shopify-app-in-an-hour-and-it-did-a8b0bad65c
After seeing the number of challenges in last 2 days to gpt-4, I see this as a possible personal challenge that could be put to gpt-4.
GPT-4:
Your a proficient shopify coder, make a replacement app for checkout.liquid app
Sound if your underlying assumption holds true - aka shopify will hold their place and the pain point caused by the platform, wont cause customers to flip to woo, or something else.
Example
In an ecosystem, you bank on the platform's growth. Salesforce.com addon ecosystem never was a great ROI for many, though it was a market leader in CRM for years. I have not tracked shopify deeply as a citizen i dont like it. If I am trying to choose where to buy from the one that is not shopify is where i buy from. Given shopify marketshare I must be an exception.
Thanks for the comment.
I'm bullish on the Shopify ecosystem. Just always worried the app store was saturated. And it is. lol. But I feel Shopify is continuing to add new opportunities, and the idea here is to get in early on either of these two new ones before they get saturated. That sort of touches on your Salesforce story; it's a pareto distribution, a few players take the majority of the income. The earlier you are to an opportunity, the greater the chance you have to become one of the incumbents.
That'd be the dream. BUT. I suspect most merchants has highly customized Checkout liquid code, that's at least my understanding of why they'd use it. So I think it'll be hard to create a 1-click migration for most use cases.
I don't want a quick cash grab, I'd prefer stable MRR. My current idea is to build public apps that is a "build it once, get many customers" scenario. And if I have bandwidth from building+maintaining+growing those, I could use those as a) social proof of domain expertise, b) funnel for merchants that want something custom.
I think my current challenge is figuring out which of the two tracks is more likely to get long-term success for myself, and I think it's the public app track.
Excellent reply. Your on to it. I have been in many migrations from business side. 1-click can be a wizard. This is a point solution so there are only so many configurable options. myob-> xero is highly configured full accounting solutions. If its possible there, then its possible.
Or do it for 80%, then the rest . Or do it for the first 100 free etc.. Something like that IF you genuinely care about helping. People before profit. Ive been helping small to medium business for yonks... and I see time and time great savvy programming go to waste as they went for the cash grab.
Even happy to lend a volunteer hand if business support is needed (and you care about community genuinely). It is like an opening sale, need solid hands on deck for short span of time. But every interaction is critical to build customer base.