Payment processing through Admin REST API

[eliyaba]

Hi, I’m a Shopify newbie but experienced developer.

My client owns a Shopify shop and would like to integrate a third party merchant that would fulfill orders to their shopify shop.

This means this third party is selling to end clients in bulk, and they are making orders to this shopify store.

They need the ability to create an order and pay for it all via Shopify.

My course of action is using the python sdk to create an order and a transaction, But it seems they need to register as a sales channel to go through the Checkout process? 
Is there no other way around it? This app will be used only with this specific store and has no client facing UI so makes more sense to be a private app.

Could anyone help me on how o approach this?

Thank you!

[Alan]

Hi @eliyaba - great question. You are right that access to the checkout aspects of our REST API are generally limited to sales channels, and sales channels are required to be listed as public apps. That said, one way to navigate around this would be to create the sales channel as an unlisted app.

Effectively, your app would still have an App Store listing, but it would be hidden from merchants who are searching for sales channels on the App Store itself, so if you wanted to only have it installed on a select few stores, you could share the unlisted install link with the clients who would be using the app. 

It's not the most elegant solution, but at the moment since private apps, non-sales channel public apps and sales channels are governed differently, each do have different scopes and access authorizations that are specific to the type of app.  

I also wanted to mention our Storefront API, which might be useful here. It's built in GraphQL and not REST, but it does offer some pretty robust checkout access/features which could be useful for your app. Could be something to look into there as well as an option. 

Hope this provided some next steps/clarified how our sales channels scopes work. 

Cheers!

[eliyaba]

Hi @Alan , thank you for the detailed reply.
I have much more context now and will dive into developing the sales channel.

I see when I try to change visibility of an app that I have to register to the app store with a one time 99$ fee or rev share. 

I don't really understand that, I want to build an app for my use only, that is a little counter intuitive to pay for app store registration then 🙂
Is there any way around this?
Hope to hear from you soon. Thanks again
 

[Alan]

Hi again - glad I could help at least a little bit here, always happy to share context! I was able to confirm in our dev docs that custom apps don't have access to our Billing API as a general rule, but I'm going to forward a note on to our developers to look at potentially adding Billing API access to custom apps in the future or other form of Billing/Checkout integration. I can't guarantee anything on my end, but I'm happy to pass that along for sure - since I do understand how there would be great use cases for access to Billing features for custom apps like you mentioned. 

Cheers!