Shopify Blog - Developers

Application Link Icons

2009-11-06T13:00:00Z

Thanks to a suggestion from one of our fine developers, application links can now have icons.

To set an application link’s icon, click the “Choose an icon” link in the app’s edit screen:

A screen then appears, showing the entire Silk icon set from famfamfam. Select one of these by clicking on it.

After selecting an icon, it’ll appear right away:

Save the changes made to the app, and the icon will appear next to the link in your users’ admins:

Shopify Billing API Opens

2009-09-25T13:00:00Z

We’re happy to announce the full release of the Shopify Billing API.

Shopify Apps are now able to issue one-time and monthly recurring charges (i.e. subscription plans) through the API, which means that features like tiered plans, coupon codes, trial periods, and much more are easily doable.

Invoicing and collection of application charges and plan upgrading/downgrading are all handled by Shopify – there’s no complex billing code for you as a developer to deal with or have to write yourself.

If you’d like to know more, documentation and a tutorial on how to use the new billing API features are available with the Shopify API docs.

Shopify API Change Notice

2009-09-21T20:17:00Z

The following changes will be made to the API, effective Monday, Octobert 3, 2009 12:00am EST

Deprecation of POST/PUT for variant title.
Clients will no longer be able to modify Variant Title through POST/PUT methods. As Variant Title is a concatenation of Option1 Value, Option2 Value (if applicable), and Option3 Value (if applicable), clients should modify these values instead.
GET methods for Products and Variants are unaffected, and will still return Variant Title as the concatenation of Option Values for a given Variant.

Shopify API documentation:
Products API
Product Variants API

Shopify App Developer IRC Meetup: September 25th, 2:00PM EST

2009-09-09T13:00:00Z

Shopify is having an App Developer meetup September 25th.

Come join us in IRC in the #shopify channel on irc.freenode.net at 2:00PM EST and talk with some of the API AppStore developers about how you can turn some ideas you’ve got floating around into a moneymaker sold on the AppStore.

For more about building Apps, see http://www.shopify.com/developers/

Unsure about IRC? Jump over to the web-client, choose a nick for yourself, and join the channel.

(Update: the title was mistakenly set to September 19th. Please disregard the old date.)

Admin Resources Now Countable

2009-07-17T12:00:00Z

After listening to early adopters of the Shopify API in the Developer Forums, we’ve rolled out the ability to issue count requests on resources like Order and Product.

The count requests look like and take the same conditions and parameters you’d give to the existing find request you’re used to – they just return a count of how many orders, products or other resource you’re querying for.

Here’s an example of how to ask how many orders have yet to be shipped:


  http://snowdevil.myshopify.com/admin/orders/count?fulfillment_status=unshipped

We’ve also added counting to the ShopifyAPI library that comes with the shopify_app plugin, so you can now write


  ShopifyAPI::Order.count(:status => "unshipped")

and you’ll get back just what you expect.

Check out the updated docs in http://api.shopify.com and the open-source shopify_app plugin at Github.

Build and deploy a Shopify app in 8 minutes

2009-06-11T19:15:00Z

Are you a developer with an idea for a Shopify app that’s been buzzing around in your head for a while but haven’t known what would be involved in implementing it? Here’s a screencast we just uploaded that shows you each step involved in the process of getting a Shopify app online for anyone to use.

After signing up as a Shopify Partner, you’ll need Rails, Git, and a free Heroku account to follow along at home.

Update: The process for using API credentials in production have changed since the screencast was recorded. Instead of running shopify.yml through ERB, the shopify_app plugin now always looks for the environment variables for your credentials before resorting to shopify.yml. So shopify.yml should go in your .gitignore file as soon as you use the plugin’s generator, and then you’ll never have to worry about accidentally including live credentials in your code.

Shopify App Store and API Officially Launched!

2009-06-02T16:21:00Z

Shopify is proud to announce the release of the Shopify Platform!

For the occasion of Shopify’s third birthday, we are officially announcing two major releases that will make Shopify better than ever – the Shopify App Store and the Shopify API!

Shopify App Store

The Shopify App Store is another very exciting project that is also released today. It benefits two different groups of people: Shopify storeowners, and Shopify developers.

Shopify storeowners now have the opportunity to add applications to their Shopify store that will allow them to do all sorts of things they have been unable to do before. From custom invoices and sales reports, to pretty much anything else you can imagine! Here’s a sampling of the first few applications that are available:

Pixel Printer – an application that makes printing invoices simple
PowerReviews App – a full-featured customer reviews application
Fetch – easy-to-use application for selling digital goods
Mapify – live geolocation of your customers’ purchases
BaseSync – tool for syncing a store’s products to Google Base

In order to browse and purchase new apps, you go directly to the App Store, browse for the application that you want, and then simply click Install and presto!

In the near future, application developers will even be able charge for their apps using Shopify’s billing system. This is a big win for users, as any app charges will be included in their regular Shopify bill; and it’s a big win for developers, who won’t have to write custom billing code for their apps.

Check out the App Store right now to see all the great things that are on there, and keep your eyes peeled for the new apps that will be released in the future!

Shopify API

The Shopify API has been in the works for a long time and is finally ready. We’ve worked closely with many pre-launch partners that have made the API very robust and we are proud of the final result. The Shopify API will allow developers to create tools that integrate directly with Shopify, and to create applications which will then be sold or offered for free in the App Store.

The API is documented to make it easy for developers to create new applications to be integrated into the Shopify App Store. Interested in becoming a developer and earning recurring revenues from your apps? Check out our Partners page to sign up!

You can also check out our press release about this here

HTTP WebHooks for extending Shopify

2008-02-21T18:00:00Z

Shopify’s latest feature allows you, in addition to receiving email notifications for new orders, also receive WebHooks. WebHooks are a way to tell Shopify to call a script on one of your own web servers and react to the event in any way you want.

Some possible uses for this feature include:

Notify your IM client or your pager when you are offline
Collect data for data-warehousing
Integrate your accounting software
Filter the order items and inform various drop shippers about the order
Create license keys for software sales

Once you register a webhook url with Shopify we will issue a HTTP Post to the url specified and pass on the Order as an XML document. Don’t worry, if your server is down we will simply try again until your server confirms to us that it has successfully received the notification.

To learn more about Web hooks please visit the WebHook wiki page