Now let me be a little less critical and hurt and summarise what we can do.
We can use Subscriptions API beta if we have filed for public beta access and have been granted access for one of our dev apps. This API is well documented in GraphQL Admin API reference docs and the developers portal tutorials provide fantastic step-by-step walk throughs how to get going with subscriptions.
Subscriptions are basically a few parts we as app devs must be aware of:
- Create an Argo admin extension for the subscriptions extension point using Shopify CLI, register it with your app that's been granted beta access, push it and go publish it in your app dashboard. Under the hood, Argo for admin uses argo-admin-host which in turn uses several bits of remote-ui facilitating the entire architecture where Argo extensions are assembled on a a separate thread (web worker) and then pushed to the UI thread of the host i.e. the extension you created, registered, pushed and published before is actually run within Shopify admin and hosted by Shopify. Very cool stuff! Depending on the extension points, we will be able to have our app specific UIs mingling directly within product forms, order forms etc. I mean this is really really cool not just in terms of Shopify. remote-ui is simply a marvellous piece of code with use-cases far beyond the Shopify ecosystem!
- This should allow merchants to configure subscription groups, plans and associate them to products. Of course, you should also provide merchants the ability to manage not just subscription groups, plans but also actual subscriptions. That's up to your app and go crazy with Subscriptions API et al.
- Next, the theme itself must enable subscriptions i.e. the product page section must have some extra Liquid to pickup on subscription plans available to that product to display the options to the customer. How you handle that is also entirely up to you and classic Liquid fidgeting around with. Or your app provides a more up to date UI using JS. Up to you. If the product can only be sold as aa subscription it doesn't matter as the subscription will be automatically created if the product is added and checked out.
- Any subscription app should also provide the means for customers to view and edit their subscriptions so they can review or change them.
Anyhow, that's a short recap for Subscriptions API and Argo for Admin with subscriptions.
It is still in public beta, ETA for GA is sometime early 2021 unless you're one of the privileged app vendors already using it because... oh never mind :cringe:
Then there's post-purchase upsell or Upsell API or Argo for Checkout - no idea what they're all officially called. They're closed beta i.e. the stuff I am angry about for how Shopify has handled it for the rest of us.
This little beauty essentially allows customers to receive product offers right within checkout after they've entered their card details but before the thank you (order status) page. What's real neat about this is if they opt-in to the offer, they do not need to enter their payment details again (as is possible now using Order Edit API). This ladies & gents is true upselling that rocks aand is why this is such a BIG deal. You just had your customer buy something, you already have their card details, you peddle them another offer, a cool upsell that makes sense and has a good discount. One click is all it takes for them!
This in turn, as far as I am able to tell for now largely uses Argo for Checkout i.e. we now have a host in checkout that can display Argo extensions at a predefined checkout extension point. It can display within right / left or footer, has a bunch of useful pre-defined UI components for vanilla JS or comes with React wrappers, Preact is being worked on because React is heavy and there's nothing stopping you using whatever you like (hypertext tagged markup, svelte, whatever). You can call your apps APIs and do something to add that offer to the existing order. It is that something which is elusive because current Edit Order API cannot capture another payment without the customer having to go through a new payment card entry. I suppose this is some API feature we know nothing of yet.
Anyhoo... if you want to play around with Argo for Checkout you cannot because... oh never mind, I'd be repeating myself :cringe:
But if you want to simulate playing with Argo for Checkout you can because somewhere within the Argo docs there was a link to the Argo sandbox environment which can be found and used (Shopify dev confirmed this) at https://argogogo.dev/. That at least hosts your little argo for checkout extension for the Checkout::PostPurchase::Render extension point (that's that page in-between payment details form and thank you page).
So just fire up Shopify CLI and
> shopify create extension
... select 'Checkout Post Purchase'
... enter extension name 'my-cool-checkout-extension'
... pick React + TS or whatever floats your boat
... sip some coffee
> cd my-cool-checkout-extension
> shopify register
... authenticate yourself
... selected one of your dev apps
... all good so far... have another sip of coffee
> shopify push
... says all is good and get some link to follow to version and publish your extension but it won't work
Ah yes it won't work because... you know by now.
So just hit
> shopify serve
to serve the extension locally, open up an HTTPS tunnel in ngrok and run over to argogogo.dev to check it out.
Let's just document this as much as we can here and share info / learn together since we aren't celebrities or rich enough to have been invited to the party.
Enjoy
