Apps

 

We're going to start looking for the next set of apps to be funded by the Shopify Fund soon, and a number of people have asked about the sort of apps we're looking for. We're looking for apps for which the answer is "yes" to at least a few of the questions listed below. If you're thinking about writing a Shopify app, keep these in mind:

Does the app help shopowners make more money? If your app does this, shopowners will definitely be interested; in fact, this is probably the number one question in their minds when they're considering your app. An app can help shopowners make money in a number of ways. Possibilities include:

• Does it bring in more customers? One way to do this is to extend the shop's reach beyond its own web page. There are a number of apps that integrate Shopify with a shopowner's Facebook page, and there are also apps that let users easily add "widgets" to other web pages (personal sites, blogs, and so on) so that customers can start the purchase process on those pages.
• Does it help increase the number of sales? One example is the category of "abandoned cart" apps, which give shopowners the ability to find customers who've filled their carts and went through most of the checkout process, but didn't make that last step of providing a credit card number and making the purchase. They can then contact these customers and try to convince them to take that last step.
• Does it help increase the money customers spend per sale? Customers spend more money when they can easily find what they want, and especially when they can find related items in a shop. You could write an app that shows customers specific products based on the search keyword that brought them to the shop or on their browsing history.

Does the app make shopowners' lives easier? Anything that lets shopowners do less work (especially tedious error-prone work) or make better decisions is welcome. Consider these questions:

• Does it give shopowners better insight into what's happening with their shops? Shopowners love getting information about their shops: reports, the ability to sift through information in different ways, being able to tell whether a promotional campaign is working, knowing what their conversion and abandonment rates are, and so on.
• Does it help with tedious, repetitive and error-prone tasks? Every line of work comes with some kind of boring task that needs to be done over and over again, and it's these tasks where people are likely to make some kind of simple, but potentially troublesome, mistake. This is especially true for shops, which have big collections of data to be entered or edited. Apps that help automate these tasks or at least help shopowners catch errors made while performing these tasks are helpful.
• Does it "mind the store" when the shopowner is busy or away? We're not talking about artificial intelligence here; instead, we're talking about apps that watch the shop and make adjustments based on simple rules or notify the shopowner when certain events happen (e.g.: when certain products become out of stock or a customer makes an unusually large order).
• What about shopowners who also have brick-and-mortar stores? We're interested in helping people with brick-and-mortar stores expand into the world of ecommerce. Any app that helps integrate their existing systems with Shopify, whether it's point-of-sale machines, inventory software, accounting software or any other application they use for their brick-and-mortar store is useful.

Does it enhance the customers' shopping experience? Customers make purchases and return visits to shops that give them a good shopping experience, so any app that helps in this area is a good one. If you're trying to come up with an app in this area, answer these questions:

• Does it improve communications between the customer and the shopowner? Examples of this sort of app include one that gives customers the ability to talk to a sales representative when they have questions about a product or a post-purchase survey. 
• Does it provide personal touches that will bring the customer back? Examples of this sort of app include one that sends a "thank you" note to a customer after a sale, or one that sends out the occasional marketing email tailored to the customer's preferences and purchase history.
• Does it simplify the shopping experience or make it more pleasant? Examples of this sort of app include letting people set up "wish lists" for items they'd love to receive as gifts, ones that let customers participate in "points" programs or an app that lets customers personalize items they buy, either with custom text or images.

 

The Shopify Fund -- Shopify's million-dollar fund for encouraging developers to build apps on the Shopify platform -- is in full swing, with the first set of developers to receive funding hard at work on their applications (and in one case, a book). Here's a quick recap of their projects:

We're going to start looking for the next set of apps to be funded soon, and I thought I'd let you know about the kinds of apps we're looking for:

• Apps that integrate Facebook and Shopify: With 845 million monthly active users (425 million of whom are mobile), 1 in 2 North Americans being a Facebook user and Facebook accounting for 1 of every 5 web pages viewed, Facebook is a great place for shopowners to promote themselves and their shops, products and specials. We'd like to see more apps that bring together Facebook and Shopify, and especially those that make it easy for shopowners to set up a storefront on their Facebook pages. Mark Hayes recently wrote about these kinds of apps; check out his article titled How to Sell on Facebook to see examples of the sorts of apps we're looking for.
• Customer image and text uploads: Many shops sell items that can be customized either with custom text (such as the customer's name on a sports uniform or a monogrammed towel) or photo (such as the customer's photo on a mug or t-shirt). Some shopowners have come up with manual workarounds such as following up via email with their customers to get the custom text or image. We'd love to see an app that automates the process.
• Follow-up email: Here's a simple one, but it's an opportunity to get imaginative. There's a lot of call for an app that emails customers after they've place their orders, thanking them for shopping at the shop and providing extra information such as "If you have any questions or concerns about your order, here's an email address you can write to". Follow-up emails help keep shopowners in touch with the customers and can also be a great way to point customers to new products and events such as upcoming sales.
• Rentals App: Shopify is great "out of the box" for selling products that you can ship to customers who will then own them, whether they're physical or digital. However, there are people in the business of loaning out rather than selling things. We'd like to see an app that lets people book things for rental, whether they're cars, computers or cooking equipment. Rental products can be mapped to products, but an app would have to take care of who's renting which item and when, and prevent things such as two customers renting the same thing at the same time.
• Resource-Booking App: In a case similar to the one with the Rentals App (see above), there are people in the business of selling things that aren't shipped butbooked, such as: memberships (for gyms, clubs and all sorts of organizations), booking training and courses and services (such as catering, dog walking, housekeeping and so on). Resources such as these can be mapped onto products, but we'd like to see an app that helps take care of the extra stuff involved in booking resources, whether it's availability (such as the maximum size for a class, or the availability of a dog walker at a certain day and time).

If you've got an idea for an app and would like Shopify to fund its development, drop us a line at the Shopify Fund email address: fund@shopify.com. We're already looking around for apps to fund, so sooner is better!

HackVan, the Vancouver edition of HackDays -- the cross-Canada hackfest in which developers of all skill levels are challenged to use one or more of the sponsors' APIs and build a cool new app in a day -- takes place today! The apps will be judged by a panel of distinguished people from the Vancouver tech scene, and if you were at last year's HackVan, you know the prizes are pretty sweet.

Here's a compressed version of today's itinerary: At 9:30 a.m. Pacific time, each of the sponsors will present their APIs, after which the developers will form teams (if they haven't already) and come up with ideas for an app they can build by the deadline, which is around 5:00 p.m.. At 5:30, teams will present their apps to the judges, who will then deliberate and announce the top teams and honorable mentions at 7:30.

We know that coming up with an app idea on short notice isn't easy, especially when you combine it with forming a team with people you might not know, using APIs that may be unfamiliar to you and trying to get something working in a day (well, part of a day, actually). In order to make life easier (and with the not-so-ulterior motive of getting you to use the Shopify API at HackVan), we've come up with a list of apps that you might want to try building, whether you're at HackVan or "just want to play the home edition".

Product Comparison

 

Customers often have a general idea of what they want to buy. It gets tricky when it comes down to choosing a specific item, especially once they've narrowed down their choices. The harder it is for a customer to compare his or her narrowed-down choices, the more likely he or she is going to give up and not make a purchase.

This app idea is an attempt to solve that problem. It would allow customers to select two (or possibly more) items and see them side by side, perhaps along with the description and price of item. If you want to get fancy, you could highlight something about an item, such as which one is the cheaper one, or which one was bought by more customers.

For this app, you'll definitely use the Shopify API's product resource, which lets you retrieve information about one, several or all products in a shop. Each product object has properties that you'll want to use in this app, such as:

• the body_html property, which contains the description of the item, complete with HTML formatting
• the variants array, which holds info about the different variations of the product. One of the properties of each variant object is price, which you'll need, especially if you're highlighting price differences
• the images array, which contains image objects. Each image object has a property called src which specifies the location of a product image stored within Shopify.
• If you're taking on the additional challenge of showing which product is the more popular one, you'll want to use the orders resource, which you can use to get a list of all orders placed at the shop. You would then comb through the orders to count purchased products in order to determine which one was more popular.  

User Surveys

Just after their customers' money, the thing that shopowners want is customer feedback. Without this information, they're just guessing at what their customers want and what's working for them and what isn't. 

One way many shopowners can get this feedback is by sending surveys to customers who've recently bought something from their shops. Keep in mind that you don't want this survey to be too long, because customers will simply ignore it, or worse, choose not to go to that shop again!

You'll want to use the Shopify API's order resource for this one. You can use it to get information about one, several or all orders placed at the shop. One of the properties of an order object is email, which is the email address of the customer who placed the order. You might also want to use other properties, such as the line_items array to get an idea of what they customer bought and the total_price property to determine how much he or she spent (and possibly tailor the survey, based on these values).

Naturally, you'll only want to send the survey to people whose orders have already been shipped. Check the order's fulfillment_status!

Follow-up Email

In a world where there are so many places online to buy stuff, customer service can set you apart. Good customer service and treating the customer well creates return customers. One aspect of good customer service is the follow-up, which can often just be a quick email saying, "hey, thanks for shopping with us".

If you're new to the Shopify API or a developer just getting started, you might want to try developing this app. It should email customers who've recently made a purchase at the shop a quick "thank you" note. As an added bonus, you might want to include a discount code in the email to entice the customer to use the shop again.

As with the "User Surveys" app mentioned above, you'll want to use the Shopify API's order resource for this app. Each order object has an email property containing the email address of the person who made the purchase, a line_items array containing the items they purchased, and fulfillment_status property to tell you if the order has been completely shipped.

Store Status via Voice

Shopowners want to stay on top of their stores' current status. They check their shops' admin pages constantly, seeing if new orders have come in, if any items are out of stock, what's getting shipped, and so on.

There are times when a shopowner can't check his or her shop's admin pages visually -- while driving or walking about. To solve this problem, we suggest an app that uses voice technology (such as the great technology from our friends at Twilio) to report highlights and alerts about their shop status. Two important pieces of information that shopowners would like to know are: orders that have just come in, and if an item has become out of stock.

You can check stock of levels of each item using the Shopify API's product resource. Each product object has a variants array, and each variant object has two properties: inventory_policy, which tells you if Shopify tracks the stock levels of that variant, and inventory_quantity, which tells you how many of those items are in stock if Shopify tracks its stock levels.

To see which orders have recently come in, use the Shopify API's order resource.

Customer Image/Text Uploads

Some shopowners want to sell customizable items. This app would allow them to upload an image or customer text, which would then be incorporated into the item's design, such as putting the customer's picture or name on a t-shirt, mug or other item.

For this app, you'll definitely want to put some kind of annotation in an order object, probably in the note field.

Minimum Quota

In some cases, a shopowner doesn't want to fulfill an order for an item until s/he gets a minimum number of orders for that item. This often happens in cases where the item is hard to come by or if the wholesaler for that item has a similar quota.

The idea behind this app is to not fulfill any orders for specific items until a predetermined number of orders of that item appear in the shop. Only when that number has been reached or exceeded will those orders be fulfilled.

You'll definitely want to use the Shopify API's order resource for this one.

The Shopify Fund is a one million dollar pool of money that we’re using to encourage the development of apps built on Shopify’s ecommerce platform. We’ve funded the first four apps, which I’ve summarized in this article, and we’re on the lookout for more! The video above (4 minutes, 11 seconds) explains both Shopify apps and the Shopify Fund.

If you’re an app developer and want to get in on some of this Shopify Fund action, take a look at the Shopify Fund page and use the form to tell us about your app idea! We might fund it.

If you’ve already applied for the Shopify Fund but aren’t one of the first four to get funded, keep working on your app idea and submit it to the Shopify App Store! The fund isn’t just about getting new apps built, but also enabling developers to work on improvements to their apps. Submit your app, go to the Shopify Fund page and tell us about it! We might fund that development.

If you’ve got an app in the Shopify App Store already and you have ideas for a revision, go to the Shopify Fund page and let us know what they are – we might fund that revision!

[ This article also appears in Global Nerdy. ]

Creative Commons photo by paul (dex). Click to see the original.

HackDays -- the gatherings that bring together Canada's brightest geeks to build projects in a single day -- kicks off 2012 with a session in Toronto on Saturday, February 12th. This one's an interesting one, as it's a part of the extended Social Media Week, the global multi-city conference taking place from February 13th through 17th. Here's a quick explanation of what Social Media Week, and this year's theme, Empowering Change Through Collaboration, are all about:

In keeping with the idea behind Social Media Week and HackDays' spirit of building stuff with readily-available APIs, the theme of this Toronto HackDay is "Apps for Good". Take the APIs -- including Shopify's ecommerce API -- to build applications that can change the world around us for the better. You'll have a day to do it, and the best apps, as determined by a panel of judges, will be awarded prizes (the prizes are usually pretty sweet: we've handed out MacBook Airs and iPads to the winners).

Shopify will be there! More specifically, I'll be there, representing Shopify, along with some other Shopifolks, to help run the event, help participants with the Shopify API and generally provide moral support to everyone there. We'll also be sponsoring the event and providing a prize for the best use of our API.

If you're looking to take on a hacking challenge and put your skills to the test, meet your fellow geeks and build an app for the greater good, HackDays Toronto is for you! Sign up here (registration is free for hackers building apps), and do it soon -- space is limited!

[ This article also appears in Global Nerdy. ]

Ask any small business owner who’s opened the Pandora’s box of online advertising and they will tell you: it’s a headache. Between keyword bid management, multiple ad platforms, and a plethora of acronyms like CTR, CPC, and CPA, it’s as if the advertising world deliberately conspires to make itself as confusing as possible. What starts out as a small experiment can quickly consume a significant amount of your valuable time and resources. But wait, you could always hire an ad agency, right? Sure—well, that is, if you’re willing to shell out thousands a month or a high % of your spend.

Mark Costigliola, the managing director of Shopify store EarthLED told me how they successfully solved their advertising problems by using the Shopify App Lexity, which automates online advertising for your store. They've used the App since 2010, and it can automatically manage keywords, ads, bids, shopping feeds, synchronization with store inventory, and real-time customer tracking.

Using Lexity, EarthLED saw significant improvement year over year:

• Sales revenue increased 27%
• Visits increased 42%
• Pageviews increased 54%

“The key factor to compare here is we did not have to increase our ad budget or time spent to achieve these numbers. This has been via managing our advertising via Lexity versus managing it ourselves.” (Mark Costigliola)

The Problem

Managing advertising took too much time and effort. Since opening their digital doors in 2007, EarthLED has found success as one of the largest distributors in the country of LED bulbs. Costigliola and his team started out managing Google AdWords themselves but found it took too much time and effort, and they didn’t want to have to pay someone to do it full-time.

“There was a lot of maintenance involved; anything with pay per click was difficult to manage internally. We could have only done it if we’d hired someone to take care of it full-time, but we knew pay-per-click advertising worked for us and got a lot more eyeballs on our product. So as soon as Lexity came around it was something I was interested in.”

Their Solution

Lexity simplified EarthLED’s online advertising. "We had used other platforms before trying Lexity. Now that we've tried Lexity, I don't ever want to mess with going back and doing it on our own again." Costigliola says Lexity greatly simplified managing EarthLED’s online advertising. In fact, Mark was so accustomed to needing to manage everything himself that it took some time for him to realize that he didn't have to anymore.

“I had to step back and realize: Lexity makes it a lot simpler. You have to think simpler. You can stop thinking about logistics and start thinking, what do I want people to find me by?”

Since EarthLED started using Lexity in June 2010, the App has undergone some dramatic changes that added transparency and finer controls. Lexity used to be more of a “black box”, Costigliola says. The App added real-time customer tracking in March, and in September last year, the App unveiled a completely new interface, which allowed users to view and edit all ads and keywords, added more detailed reporting, and the abilities to advertise specific products and use retargeting ads. Costigliola says the new interface makes it easier for him to “tweak things and tailor what our team is doing around what’s going on in Lexity.”

The Results 

More Sales, Visits, Pageviews, and Free Time. Using Lexity, EarthLED achieved a 27% year over year increase in sales revenue, 42% increase in visits, and 54% increase in pageviews.

“The key factor to compare here is we did not have to increase our ad budget or time spent to achieve these numbers. This has been via managing our advertising via Lexity versus managing it ourselves.”

Costigliola says Lexity saved him hours of time:

“We used to spend roughly 5 to 7 hours per week on Google Adwords, and we now spend about 10 to 20 minutes per week at most tweaking Lexity based on suggestions it makes to us. This is 3 to 5 hours I used to have to spend on this process personally. For someone running a company this is a huge amount of time to now be able to spend on other items.”

Cool Feature: Real-Time Feed of Customer Activity

Costigliola’s favorite feature, though, is Lexity Live View, which shows you a real-time feed of all customer activity in your store. "I love using Live View every day. I keep it on a screen all the time.” He says Live View has helped give the EarthLED team instantaneous insight into their business and how to improve it.

“Live View has given us a lot more intelligence about how our business operates, and how different things we do during the day affect who's coming to our site. It gives us a finger on the pulse of our business. Being an ecommerce store, if you can't see what's going on in your store at any given time, you really don't know what's going on.”

“I'll watch it and be able to see if someone purchases or abandons the checkout. Or I'll post something on Facebook and start seeing people come in from Facebook. It’s an instantaneous reaction to what you're doing, and because it's something we can watch and measure, it's helped us to be a lot more proactive in what we do every day. It's revitalized how we update our site, because we update things more frequently when we can see we're getting results. For example, we've added a lot more categories and different ways for people to find different products on our site, and we've seen how that helps people actually buy a product. Live View is one of the best things that’s been added to the platform.”

Advice to Shopify Users

Since Shopify store EarthLED has been using the App for over a year now, we asked him if he had any advice for new Lexity users.He kindly gave these three tips: 

1. Stores that are brand new on Shopify should start with the Overall Store or Specific Products themes, as the Retargeting theme works best for stores with significant traffic.
2. Since Lexity factors in store copy to make keyword recommendations, Costigliola also recommends that new users make sure their site and product pages have good content to increase the likelihood of good performance from Lexity.
3. Users should learn to step back (like he did) and “let Lexity do its job…follow what it’s asking and you can’t go wrong.”
   
   

You can find Lexity in the Shopify App Store! There are no fees for the first 3 months, and Lexity Live View comes free when you use it  for your online advertising.

Webhooks are brilliant when you’re running an app that needs up-to-date information from a third party. They’re simple to set up and really easy to consume.

Through working with our third-party developer community here at Shopify, we’ve identified some common problems and caveats that need to be considered when using webhooks. Best practices, if you will.

When Should I Be Using Webhooks?

Let’s start with the basics. The obvious case for webhooks is when you need to act on specific events. In Shopify, this includes actions like an order being placed, a product price changing, etc. If you would otherwise have to poll for data, you should be using webhooks.

Another common use-case we’ve seen is when you’re dealing with data that isn’t easily searchable though the API you’re dealing with. Shopify offers several filters on our index requests, but there’s a fair amount of secondary or implied data that isn’t directly covered by these. Re-requesting the entire product catalog of a store whenever you want to search by SKU or grabbing the entire order history when you need to find all shipping addresses in a particular city is highly inefficient. Fortunately some forward planning and webhooks can help.

Let’s use searching for product SKUs on Shopify as an example:

The first thing you should do is grab a copy of the store’s product catalog using the standard REST interface. This may take several successive requests if there’s a large number of products. You then persist this using your favourite local storage solution.

Then you can register a webhook on the product/updated event that captures changes and updates your local copy accordingly. Bam, now you have a fully searchable up-to-date product catalog that you can transform or filter any way you please.

How Should I Handle Webhook Requests?

There’s no official spec for webhooks, so the way they’re served and managed is up to the originating service. At Shopify we’ve identified two key issues:

• Ensuring delivery/Detecting failure
• Protecting our system

To this end, we’ve implemented a 10-second timeout period and a retry period for subscriptions. We wait 10 seconds for a response to each request, and if there isn’t one or we get an error, we retry the connection several times over the next 48 hours.

If you’re receiving a Shopify webhook, the most important thing to do is respond quickly. There have been several historical occurrences of apps that do some lengthy processing when they receive a webhook that triggers the timeout. This has led to situations where webhooks were removed from functioning apps. Oops!

To make sure that apps don’t accidentally run over the timeout limit, we now recommend that apps defer processing until after the response has been sent. In Rails, Delayed Jobs are perfect for this.

What Do I Do if Everything Blows Up?

This one is a key component of good software design in general, but I think it’s worth mentioning here as the scope is beyond the usual recommendations about data validation and handling failures gracefully.

Imagine the worst case scenario: Your hosting centre exploded and your app has been offline for more than 48 hours. Ouch. It’s back on its feet now, but you’ve missed a pile of data that was sent to you in the meantime. Not only that, but Shopify has cancelled your webhooks because you weren’t responding for an extended period of time.

How do you catch up? Let’s tackle the problems in order of importance.

Getting your webhook subscriptions back should be straightforward as your app already the code that registered them in the first place. If you know for sure that they’re gone you can just re-run that and you’ll be good to go. One thing I’d suggest is adding a quick check that fetches all the existing webhooks and only registers the ones that you need.

Importing the missing data is trickier. The best way to get it back is to build a harness that fetches data from the time period you were down for and feeds it into the webhook processing code one object at a time. The only caveat is that you’ll need the processing code to be sufficiently decoupled from the request handlers that you can call it separately.

Webhooks Sound Magic, Where Can I Learn More?

We have a comprehensive wiki page on webhooks as well as technical documentation on how to manage webhooks in your app.

There’s also a good chunk of helpful threads on our Developer Mailing List.

A couple of weeks ago, at the very end of November, Shopify and Twilio announced a contest in which we challenged developers to write an app that made use of both Shopify’s ecommerce API and Twilio’s phone API. We offered some interesting prizes as well as bragging rights, and a number of developers stepped forth with their creations.

Various members of the Shopify and Twilio teams reviewed the app submissions last week. On the Shopify side, it was me and my fellow members of Shopify’s Apps Team, Edward “Open Data, Skinny Jeans” Ocampo-Gooding and David “Rooty Tooty Point-and-Shooty” Underwood. Along with the fine folks at Twilio, we chose three apps that we thought were both creative and made good use of both our APIs.

And they are…

First Place: Buzzy

Before I begin, take a look at this video of a delivery guy "dropping off" the monitor that Craig "Craigslist" Newmark ordered:

Ouch. If only the delivery person had the access code, he could’ve opened the gate and not simply chucked the monitor over it.

Enter Buzzy, the app that acts like a “disposable automated doorman”. If you live in a building with one of those buzzer systems that rings your apartment’s phone and you’re expecting a delivery (hopefully from a Shopify-powered shop!), Buzzy can give the delivery person an access code to open the lobby door. Buzzy integrates with Shopify so that an access code is activated when a product is shipped and deactivated when the product is delivered.

Buzzy is the creation of Ottawa-based developer Sam Wilson, who dropped by the Shopify office earlier this week to pose for his victory photo (see left). We liked it because it was an excellent fusion of both Shopify (online shops, which necessitate delivery) and Twilio (phone apps) and solved a problem that many people have: the delivery guy not being able to get past that locked lobby door. It was clearly the most ambitious, clever and original of the app submitted to the contest, so there wan’t much debate over which submission would win first prize.

Here’s a video of Buzzy in action:

As the first prize winner, Sam got to take home an 11-inch MacBook Air and 27-inch Apple Cinema Display.

Second Place: CallBack

Nothing helps a shop do better business than customer feedback. That’s what CallBack is for: it lets shopowners create automated phone surveys. After an order is fulfilled, CallBack calls a customer on the phone and presents him/her with a quick survey.

The video below shows how CallBack works:

CallBack's developers were Josh and Steve Conley. In addition to being a useful app, we also liked CallBack it was rare in one key area: while most apps used the Twilio API to turn the phone into an output-only device, CallBack uses the phone as both an input device (for customer answers to the survey) as well as an output device (for providing the survey instructions and questions).

As the winners of second prize, Josh and Steve will get a Lego Mindstorms swag bag featuring NXT 2.0, a bundle of touch, light and sound sensors, and a Bluetooth dongle.

Third Place: Helpline

Sometimes, you just need to talk to someone when looking for help in a store. We think the same thing happens in online shops – wouldn’t it be nice to get help from a real live human being?

Helpline does just that. It adds a “click-to-call” button to your shop’s product pages so that customers can talk to someone from your shop about specific products. As a shopowner, Helpline will let you know what product they’re currently looking at before they have the chance to tell you.

Here’s a quick screenshot of Helpline in action:

As the third prize winner, Helpline’s developer gets a Kindle Fire ebook reader.

In Closing…

We’d like to thank everyone who participated in the contest and submitted an app. Hopefully, it gave you a chance to check out the Shopify and Twilio APIs and perhaps think of new uses for them, either separately or together!

We’d also like to thank the folks at Twilio for inviting us to help out with their developer contest. At Shopify, we’re big fans of Twilio and see it as a natural fit for all sorts of mash-ups with Shopify.

Keep an eye on this blog: in the new year, we’ll be talking a lot of Shopify app development, and one of the topics will be Shopify/Twilio mashups. And keep an eye on Twilio’s contest page – they’ve often got some kind of competition going!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

A little while back, we announced the Shopify Fund, a one million dollar pool of money set aside to stimulate the development of Shopify apps, applications that made use of the Shopify API to extend, enhance and automate Shopify shops. We asked developers to submit their app proposals and if their app was chosen, we’d give them somewhere in the neighborhood of five to ten thousand dollars to take a few weeks to work on their app idea full-time, complete it and put it into the Shopify App Store.

In the end, we received 143 app proposals – many of which were submitted on the deadline date, November 30th -- a considerable deal more than we’d expected. We’ve been spending the past couple of weeks deliberating over which apps should get funding in the Fund’s first round, in closed-room sessions not unlike the scene from 12 Angry Men shown above. We still have to have a few more discussions before we make our final choices, and we’ll announce which apps are getting funding in the new year.

If you didn’t get a chance to submit an app idea or if your app idea submission doesn’t get selected, don’t worry. This is just the first round, and we want to continue funding the development of apps through the coming months – both apps that you propose and apps that we have on our wishlist. The Fund will continue because:

• We think it builds interest and excitement about the Shopify ecosystem. The number of responses we’ve received from the developers proposing apps seems to indicate this.
• We want to make it possible for developers to have the time they need to build Shopify apps. By funding developers, we give them enough money so that they don’t have to take on any other clients and just work on an app full-time.
• We want Shopify to be the ecommerce platform with the most capabilities. Shopify does a lot “out of the box”, and it does so much more when you extend it with apps. More apps means more capabilities and customizations, and we think that’s a good thing.

So keep an eye on this blog for announcements in the new year – not just about whose apps are being funded in the first round, but also for new chances for you to get funding to develop Shopify apps!

[ This article also appears in Global Nerdy. ]

The deadline for submissions to the Shopify Fund passed at the stroke of midnight, and in the end, over 100 Shopify app proposals were received and two dozen developers threw their name in the hat to build an app from our App Wishlist. These are better numbers than we expected; thanks to everyone who applied!

And now, it’s our turn. We’ll be spending the next few weeks reviewing all these submissions, choosing the apps that we think will best serve Shopify shopowners and development teams whom we think will best be able to build apps from our Wishlist. If you submitted an app or offered your services to build something from the Wishlist, we might be contacting you shortly to ask for more details about your app submission or credentials.

Then, in January, we’ll start funding the first series of apps. If your app gets selected, or if you get selected to write an app from our Wishlist, here’s what happens:

1. At the start of the project, we'll pay you the first half of the funding, which I like to describe as being “like a literary  advance, but nicer”. Keep reading to find out why.
   
2. You work on your app. We'll check in with you regularly during this time.
   
3. When the app's done, you'll get the second half of the funding.
   
4. Your app goes into the Shopify App Store. Shopowners will be able to purchase and install your app. For every sale of the app, the revenue share between you and Shopify will be 50/50; you receive 50% and we receive 50%.
   
5. Until Shopify’s total of the 50% share equals the funding given to you, the 50/50 rev share will be in effect. You’ll still make money on each sale!
   
6. Once Shopify’s 50% share is equal to the funding given to you, the revenue share changes to Shopify's standard 80/20 ratio for sales in the Shopify App Store: you receive 80% and we receive 20%.

As I said earlier, the deadline for submissions to the Shopify Fund has come and gone, but as always, we like to leave the communications lines open. If you have any questions or comments about the Shopify Fund, feel free to use the form on the Shopify Fund page or drop us a line at fund@shopify.com.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.