Dion Almaer

Software, Development, Products

Shopify

The rise of the extensible app platforms

I was excited to see Kenneth and his team ship the public beta of the Stripe App platform:

I was excited to dive into it, as I know that the developer experience would be high quality, and I wasnā€™t proven wrong. Great CLI experience. Great docs. What you have come accustomed too. As I read through the anatomy of what you are able to do with apps, I could see a lot of similarities with Shopify’s app platform.

The body of a Shopify store

Letā€™s dive into some anatomy. When chatting with one of my favorite new PMs, Ben Sehl, he shared an analogy of how a store is like a body… a metaphor which I will now abuse to kingdom come:

When you create a Shopify store, you get a simple, yet fully functioning experienceā€¦ like a human with simple attire, letā€™s call them Shopi. How do you want to take this base and make it your own?

The first step that products and platforms give you is the ability to tweak the look and feel. This is where you start with theming. You can dress up Shopi in many ways, and make them unique. You can make the clothing yourself, or you can find manufacturers (theme developers!) that have pre-built quality goods that you can then customize from there. As the platform matures, so does the supporting ecosystem.

Now, there is a lot that you can do with the look and feel, but you quickly find that you need richer customizations. This is when the app platform comes in (often called plugins/extensions). The platform controls what can be extended. Can you replace limbs? The heart? The brain? How do you do this in a way that doesnā€™t destroy the body? A great platform allows for layers of extensibility, which is as much art as science. This is the type of work I love doing, and I am excited to see Shopify continue to refine these layers.

Shopify Flow: Helping you automate workflow

Systems such as nervous, circulatory etc can be the glue that makes everything work well. This is the platform doing its job at regulating everything. Connecting things and making sure any one extension doesnā€™t blow things up. Acting as an engine for connectors and workflows like Shopify Flow.

If you look deeper at Shopify and the Stripe platform, you see a variety of surfaces that offer extension pointsā€¦ e.g. the Stripe Dashboard, or the Shopify Admin. These surfaces have specific extensions with rich context. They offer embeddable UI points, with building blocks to have your extensions fit in (e.g. components that feel consistent for the users of that surface). These extensible app platforms have a variety of surfaces. In Shopify, you can ship an app that enhances the Admin for merchants, or Checkout for users, and more.

NOTE: I was particularly excited to see that Stripe is using the open source remote-ui library that we created and use in Shopify:

Ok. So, at this point, Shopi, is looking great with awesome clothing, a bionic arm, Tony Starkā€™s heart, and AR glasses. But you may want to customize EVEN more. This is where custom storefronts come in for Shopify. You can tie into the nervous system still via API (GraphQL or REST), but the body can be entirely differentā€¦ with you building many more layers as you eschew the defaults. It doesnā€™t even have to be a binary choiceā€¦ you should be able to weave together custom and the core headful experience.

I look forward to a future where merchants can customize their own Shopi to be exactly what they need, working with the foundations that Shopify gives them, and the creativity and skill of the developer ecosystem to provide apps, themes, and custom storefront work.

I’m also excited to see more extensible app platforms such as Stripe’s, and we share ideas and technology to raise all of the boats.

Extensibility is going to go from changes to the appearance, to bionic improvements, to providing genetic modifications.

Web Developers are Shopify Developers

tl;dr By staying close to the Web platform, web developers can use all of their web knowledge, and use the latest features as they become available. There is a difference between using the web platform vs. web technologies, a subtle difference I have seen in the past. If we are doing it right, anyone can learn the technical side of Shopify quickly as itā€™s so familiar, and I have seen developers start as tinkerers through themes and small appsā€¦ but also see how the key component isnā€™t learning the tech, but learning commerce.

The Shopify Platform and Ecosystem is very aligned to the Web. We want to empower our merchants to be long term successful, and that means using all of the channels available, but ultimately driving the LTV with their customers, which means building the brand connection to them vs. aggregators such as Amazon. To do this, merchants need to differentiate, which is where developers come in. They make their commerce sites come to life. They empower the merchants through tooling. And this can be through the developer ecosystem providing functionality through their apps and themes, or through agencies helping customize directly, or with in house developers doing that work.

How can we enable this to work for our merchants and developers?

Stay close to the Web platform

The largest developer community in the world is the web developer community. It is as broad as is the Web itself, offering experiences from content to commerce to apps and even games. We want any web developer to look at building on the Shopify platform and instantly feel at home. You know how to work with backend APIs and JSON. You know how to handle layout. You know how to build on the Web.

If we are close to the web platform itself, Web developers have fewer technical details to learn before being productive, and spend more time on their commerce offerings.

And as the Web evolves, Shopify developers can quickly use new platform primitives without having to wait for the Shopify platform itself to use them.

Losing your Mojo

I have seen how this manifests in past lives. One example that tells the tale is the Mojo framework that you used to build the first applications for webOS. While it used JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, you couldnā€™t rock up with your jQuery and node knowledge and build something. You had to learn Mojo.

Itā€™s tempting as a platform to build these abstractions, because you want to bake in knowledge of the platform into a ā€œhappy pathā€ framework. But, be careful, as you are throwing away a huge number of advantages. One of the first things I did was hack webOS to allow me to just render a ā€œnormalā€ web application within the Mojo lifecycle.

With Shopify you can bring the knowledge of the Web with you.

Approachability

Some of us, who have seen the Web evolve over a couple decades, may bemoan parts of the platform. But I still contend that itā€™s the best platform to approach and start playing with. Part of this is because of the various entries to ā€œdevelopmentā€ on the Web.

I know a huge number of developers who started by hacking on some HTML. Some took their WordPress site and played with the themes. Then they built some plugins. And their journey continued from there. I often did this myself! The first version of SeekingAlpha was WordPress. Then we hacked on it to become a blog network. I was new to PHP at the time, and although it didnā€™t tickle my brain like Ruby and Perl did beforeā€¦ I had to see what it was about, and I couldnā€™t argue that it wasnā€™t productive.

We have this approachability at Shopify. You can start tweaking the theme for your store, or you can create your own one. Liquid is a templating library that is simple to use. You can go a long way in making your stores your own through themes, and then installing and customizing appsā€¦ including your own custom apps.

And for when you truly need customization that you arenā€™t able to get through the online store, you can build custom storefronts and reach for our own Hydrogen or other web frameworks. Itā€™s all just talking to an API and building a web frontend after all!

We will always want to make building commerce experiences as simple as possible, giving you the canvas to bring your vision to life. We have so much more to offer here, as we open up the platform in new ways.

As I work with the developer community, I find that while the platform can and will improve, the key isnā€™t learning the tech, but insteadā€¦

Learning Commerce

If you think about an average shopping website, you quickly see that they are often quite different, and have many custom flows and optionsā€¦ they can be complex. I find commerce deceptively deep and broad, which is exactly why there are opportunities for so many merchants and developers, and so many niche use cases that can be large niches indeed.

When jumping into Shopify for the first time, you will want to put effort into understanding commerce and all of the surfaces that Shopify opens up for you.

It is important for us to help you learn the structure *and* opportunities of commerce.

There are many paths to get into Shopify development. As I meet more in the community I see agencies with commerce experts, former merchant developers, as well as entrepreneurial developers who dive in with passion to enable merchant growth and help make commerce great for everyone. 

I will talk more about the magic of agency developers in another post, but for nowā€¦ if you are a Web developer, Shopify is here to enable you to leverage your web skills directly.

One reason I am so excited about the Shopify opportunity is that I think we can legitimately bring it to a massive population. Shopify can be both the most approachable platform for anyone new to development, and also offer all of the knobs and platform customization to let you build the most custom experiences imaginable.

/fin

The Shopify Entrepreneurial Developer

From Hello World to IPO

tl;dr We often talk about how Shopify supports entrepreneurs from the first day of their journey building a business all the way to huge merchants that grow to become unicorns, or go public, and are just plain successful. Now it’s time to show the role of developers in helping this growth, but also how our developers themselves can grow from sustainable businesses to having their own IPOs.

When I joined Shopify, I wanted to understand what was unique about the platform and ecosystem, and the role that developers play. Shopify is merchant obsessed, so it was important to understand the role of merchants.

Supporting the merchant journey

I was very excited at the long tail opportunity, and how we deeply care about helping someone from their idea around commerce all the way to becoming a huge merchant. In a general sense, you can see how the life cycle progresses, and how developers come into that journey.

  • Have an idea? To get started itā€™s as simple as creating your store on Shopify
  • There is a world of configuration available to you, and with free themes and apps available you can make your store yours
  • Once you make some sales and prove to yourself that this is working you can then decide to invest more. This ability to delay capital expenditures is really important, and can allow you to try a few things without the cost of each shot.
    • You can look at paid themes
    • You can outsource development to the app store and install apps that work for you from the ecosystem
  • Now your sales have gone from strength to strength, you can once again invest more:
    • Hire an agency that can help you really customize to your needs, building your own apps and themes
    • It may be time to hire an in house developer
  • As your needs for customization grow, you may find yourself wanting to build some headless commerce experiences, with your developers looking into Hydrogen and other options

You have as much as possible out of the box, and in the ecosystem, and you have room to expand along with your business. This is exciting, especially when you compare wanting to build an app and having to put $10k or more to get an MVPā€¦ and you have no idea of the returns.

Itā€™s vital that we allow entrepreneurs to do more with less, helping them to prioritize both time and money.

Developers scale

If you look at the developers role in the life cycle above, you see how they help the entire ecosystem scale.

The core Shopify platform will always be looking to enable the core functionality that all merchants need.

It is also true that the platform itself will never be able to offer all of the customizations that merchants need. We wonā€™t be experts in every niche that is ā€œcommerceā€. Even if we were, the admin UI would grow to be unwieldy and infinite. At our heart we want merchants to be able to be creative, innovative and unique. We understand they need to differentiate. We understand that they want to build long term relationships with their customers. It is through this legion of commerce that we all differentiate from the large online silos that offer relatively similar transactional experiences.

This is where the entrepreneurial developer comes in.

You can find a niche that serves many merchants. It may not make sense for an individual merchant to build certain functionality as the cost doesnā€™t warrant the LTV boost. However, this is where the power of aggregation comes in. An entrepreneurial developer can build that functionality and sell it to many merchants, and now the math works out for everyone.

For example, a developer can build the functionality that allows you to point your phone at your feet, and you see what they look like with those socks or shoes on. Just like that, every merchant who sells footwear can get that functionality.

There are so many opportunities to come in and solve problems for merchants. You can target types of commerce, experiences and their brand, integrations, helping with conversion, helping them understand their business, making commerce more enjoyable and fun, and so much more.

Here are some exemplars, from solo founders to small teams who are at various stages of growth.

Itā€™s a perfect time to become a Shopify Developer. You can build a business quickly, and with the growth that we are seeing, Harley wonā€™t just be tweeting about the brands that are IPOā€™ing, it will be time to showcase you, the developers. Can you tell Iā€™m excited?

/fin

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.