Hi everyone. First time posting here, and (hopefully) first time building out a Shopify-based payment system.
I am building a React Native cross-platform application. We are selling physical products, and intend to use a combination of Stripe and Shopify for payment/inventory/order management.
I have spent several days now trying to make sense of the Shopify documentation and various APIs. Here's what I've realised:
1) The REST Admin API is not fully-featured. There is no concept of a cart or checkout process. This makes it rather useless for a custom shopping experience inside a native app, as there is no way to perform cart calculations (tax, shipping, totals), not any way to put a temporary hold on inventory while the user proceeds through the checkout process. Inventory control is an important issue for me - I would rather notify my users of a lack of inventory before the checkout process, not at the end when there is an order-creation failure.
2) While the Mobile Buy SDK is probably fantastic, I am building a JavaScript-based RN application and am extremely averse to getting into platform-specific SDKs, especially for something as core as payment processing. On the flip side, the JavaScript Buy SDK does not seem like it was intended for a NodeJs environment at all, and seems rather poorly built - I experienced several incoherent errors just trying to get it set up. Additionally, the JavaScript Buy SDK seems to use a different ID format than the rest of the Shopify ecosystem. The IDs look like this: 'Z2lkOi8vc2hvcGlmeS9Qcm9kdWN0Lzc4NTc5ODkzODQ='. No idea what's going on there. Morever, and more importantly, it seems like the end goal of the JavaScript Buy SDK is to produce a Shopify URL, to which you then redirect the user for the checkout process. Meaning, the JavaScript Buy SDK is not really a "buying" SDK, but more of a "cart" SDK, at the end of which you redirect to Shopify anyways. I need a way to actually process orders programmatically.
In short, how is it possible to build a custom checkout flow in a non-browser JavaScript environment? This isn't even really specific to React Native, except that I am averse to using the Mobile Buy SDKs.
This seems like a very common use case for more complex applications that require a greater level of control over their checkout flows.
As far as I can tell, the Checkout API endpoints are only available with the Sales Channel SDK. No idea why that is, but I do not need to build some application to installed in other Shopify stores, I just need to manage my own sales internally.
On a side note, I also need to support iDEAL payments. This seems possible via Mollie, but I do not see any way to manually mark orders as complete via the Mobile Buy SDKs. There does not seem to be any official flow for accepting iDEAL payments via Shopify in a native environment.
I'm really hoping there's a robust solution hiding somewhere out there. It took a good deal of research to arrive at Shopify as a provider, and I've become pretty disheartened at this apparent lack of a full-featured API.
