Hi there! This is my first time posting so please be gentle!
I have a Shopify store that sells a limited number of products, but I am looking to expand. I want to build a Shopify app that automates the process of generating a specific string for each product variant that will be saved as a variant-level metafield.
I can figure out the coding myself - I would just appreciate some high-level guidance on what exactly I need to build. This is my first time building an app, so any ideas are appreciated.
Summary of project:
Each product variant in the store needs to have a 'shipping message' metafield. This metafield is a string that will look something like this:
'Product ships in 4-6 business days'
The exact syntax and date-range of each variant's metafield will be determined by on the basis of a number of factors (product availability, product tags, certain other metafields). I have written the logic for generating this string - so I do not need any guidance on this front.
The aforementioned factors that determine the exact syntax and date-range of the string can change on a day-by-day basis. One of the metafields is updated regularly by a third-party app. A variant's availability can change when the product is sold out. I change product's tags fairly regularly too.
For this reason, I want to build an app that updates each variant's 'shipping message' metafield on a regular basis - perhaps every hour.
I have set up a basic embedded app using the Shopify CLI 3.0. Now I've done this, I'm a bit lost. Here is what I'm guessing I need to do:
1. Set up some kind of simple interface so that the app's user can select a collection that contains all the store's products.
2. Once this collection has been selected, the ID of that collection will be used to retrieve a list of every product in that collection.
3. From there, each of each products' variant can be looped through.
4. Once at the variant-level, various information about that variant can be grabbed (product availability, product tags, certain other metafields).
5. With this information, I would (i) generated each variant's shipping message using the pre-written logic, and (ii) replace its current 'shipping_message' metafield with the newly generated shipping message.
[repeat steps 2-5 every hour]
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If anybody could give me any pointers, suggestions ideas about which APIs I should use, how they should be implemented, and any best practices that I should follow, I would be really grateful.
Thanks for taking the time to read this!
