There are some amazing, comprehensive guidebooks for building a Shopify app (including this one from Shopify). Consider this the cheat sheet on building a Shopify app.
In this article, I’ll summarize the process of building an app, from planning the functionality to marketing your Shopify app and tracking its growth.
Whatever Shopify app you build, Baremetrics is the tool you should use to monitor its growth metrics.
When it comes to monitoring all of the needed growth metrics for your Shopify app, Baremetrics excels. Baremetrics is a business metrics tool that provides 26 metrics about your business, such as MRR, ARR, LTV, total customers, and more.
Baremetrics integrates directly with your payment gateways, so information about your customers is automatically piped into the Baremetrics dashboards.
You should sign up for the Baremetrics free trial, and start monitoring your subscription revenue accurately and easily.
When building a Shopify app, you need to go through specific stages. I’ll go over each of them below.
The stages:
Research and planning
Understanding the Shopify app ecosystem
Validating your Shopify app
Designing your Shopify app
Submitting your app to the Shopify App Store
Monitoring your app
I touch on this in another article with helpful business tips for Shopify app developers, but it is worth repeating here.
Before developing an app, you need to have a plan in place. The plan should include a timeline of all the tasks that need to be completed, how long they will take, and a logical progression where tasks that rely on other tasks being completed occur after the requisite tasks.
No matter the schedule you plan to keep, a solid plan will keep you on track during the entire process.
The first part of your plan should encompass research. This research should include two main parts.
First, you’ll need to understand what it takes to build your app, get it approved, and market and track your app’s growth over time. While this article briefly covers this part, you’ll need to read the complete guide on the Shopify website to grasp the task entirely.
Second, you’ll want to understand the market you are entering. For this, I recommend considering the following questions:
What is my target market?
What other apps are competing for this target market?
What specific value will my app bring that differentiates it from the other apps?
How much can I expect to earn per user per month?
While it is best to build your Shopify app to add value to the Shopify Community, understanding the expected monthly revenue per user will tell you how much you can budget for development, how much you can spend acquiring customers (CAC), and how long you can expect to wait to be in the black.
Shopify is a stellar e-commerce ecosystem. It makes it incredibly easy for anyone to start a business. However, not even Shopify can anticipate the needs of every shop owner or build the functionality they need to excel.
This is the positioning of the Shopify app ecosystem. When building a Shopify app, you provide further functionality to the Shopify ecosystem.
Your Shopify app enters this ecosystem by connecting with one or more of the Shopify APIs, thus extending the ecosystem’s capabilities to benefit shop owners and customers.
During the research and planning phase, you should have come up with a good app idea. A good idea checks the following four boxes:
This app solves a real merchant problem.
The target market is currently trying to solve this problem in a less efficient way.
Merchants are willing to pay money to solve this problem.
Our dev team can build this app.
Before moving forward with your plan, it is worth taking a second look at your app, the market, and the Shopify ecosystem to make sure that your app has a marketable niche to exploit.
It is also important to understand whether it is possible to build the app—and if so, that your dev team has the skills to do so.
I’m going to divide this into two parts: the UX/UI decision-making and the general presentation.
When it comes time to design your UX/UI, consider the following to ensure your app provides the best possible experience:
Your UX/UI design should be both functional and visually appealing.
Your app should provide clear and simple copy.
Your app should be inclusive and accessible.
For the general presentation, you need to make sure that your app uses appropriate language.
English is the most spoken language on Earth, but most people of those people are not native English speakers. It would help to use plain English, free of complex words or jargon.
Once you have a solid English base, consider providing your app in other languages, such as Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, French, and Arabic, the next most spoken languages.
Before you start building your app, you will need the following:
You will also need the following general skills:
The ability to use your computer’s command line and text editor
The ability to code in a backend programming language, such as PHP, Node.JS, Java, Python, or Ruby on Rails
The ability to install software using the npm package manager
In addition to these skills and assets, there are loads of additional Shopify and third-party tools available to help build and manage the build of your Shopify app.
I encourage you to spend time (a lot of time) reading everything provided by Shopify, as it is immensely helpful.
The submission process is long and arduous. Shopify vets every new app to ensure it does what the developers claim it does safely and within all laws.
While this can be frustrating for developers, it is necessary for shop owners to download the over 6,000 Shopify apps currently available.
It would be best to put your frustration aside because the Shopify QA team is super helpful and wants you to succeed. Listen to them!
To the point, you need to ensure the following three steps have been performed before submitting your app:
Your app meets Shopify’s app requirements.
You have written a thorough and accurate app listing.
Your app has been tested successfully in many different use cases.
Monitoring your app means two things. The first entails tracking your app’s market growth, and the second is ensuring your app remains compatible with the ever-changing Shopify ecosystem so that it remains safe and functioning.
Shopify recommends the AARRR (acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral) metric system in their guidebook as a good way to track your business growth.
When building your metrics tech stack, you should sign up for Baremetrics.
Baremetrics is a business metrics tool that provides 26 metrics about your business, such as MRR, ARR, LTV, total customers, and more.
Baremetrics integrates directly with Shopify, so information about your customers is automatically piped into the Baremetrics dashboards.
You should sign up for the Baremetrics free trial, and start monitoring your subscription revenue accurately and easily.
I’ve compiled a list of some frequently asked questions I see online about building a Shopify app.
The short answer is no. Shopify is language-agnostic.
However, Shopify provides official libraries for Ruby and Python. Third-party libraries are also available for Node, PHP, and other languages.
So, if you are new to coding, these languages might be the best place to start. If you are a seasoned coder, you might find using these languages faster, given the ample assets available.
First, you should read the Complete Guide Book provided by Shopify, including all of the associated supplementary pages (warning: it is long).
You’ll need to learn a language, and while Shopify is language-agnostic, Ruby or Python is usually considered the easiest to start with.
Once your app is built, you’ll need to market it, provide customer service, maintain and further develop its functionality, pay associated hosting fees, and monitor its financials.
In addition, Shopify takes a percentage of the revenue over a high threshold.
Public apps are widely available and can be listed in the Shopify App Store.
Custom apps are made specifically and solely for a single merchant and are not listed in the Shopify App Store.
Private apps are designed for a limited segment of merchants and are not listed in the Shopify App Store.
There are so many great tools available for building a Shopify app that I wrote a separate article on this topic.
Many of the best tools for developing apps come from Shopify, including their Polaris and REST Admin API playgrounds, sample apps, and data generators.
Beyond that, you should also check out general productivity tools such as Slack, Notion, and Trello.
Once your app is up and running, you will need tools to track your revenue growth and metrics. Baremetrics is essential as part of your metrics tech stack.
Whatever app you decide to build, development is only the start. Once completed, you’ll need to market it and track your revenue progress.
This is difficult to do alone, so you should use Baremetrics.
Baremetrics makes it easy to collect and visualize all of your sales data. When you have many users, it can be difficult to calculate your MRR, ARR, LTV, and so much more. Thankfully, Baremetrics can do all of this for you.
Baremetrics can even monitor your SaaS quick ratio. Integrating this innovative tool can make financial analysis seamless for your Shopify Partners company, and you can start a free trial today.