Get Access from external app to product information from Store Admin API

Retired Boards Appdev Authentication

Topic summary

  • Developer wants an external web app to read a store’s sales, revenue, customers, and orders after a user installs an app from the Shopify marketplace. The embedded app should act only as a connector (no frontend) and let users log in on the external site to view their store data. Private app credentials are not acceptable.

  • Suggested approach: create a custom app, grant the necessary access scopes (e.g., orders, customers), and use the Shopify Admin API (GraphQL) to query store data and transfer it to the external platform.

  • Notes: The recommendation specifies a “custom app,” while the requester intended a public app; this distinction and the exact authentication/communication flow were not detailed. The conversation does not cover the auth mechanism beyond scopes or how the external app session is linked to the store.

  • Status: Guidance provided at a high level (use Admin API with appropriate scopes); specifics on authentication and app architecture remain open.

Summarized with AI on December 23. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hello,

Im trying to develop an external web app that needs access to data like sales, revenue, customers, orders etc. to make calculations about expenses

The goal i want to achieve:

  • user adds an app from shopify marketplace to his shop

  • on the external web app, user can log-in and see the data about his store, that he added the shopify embedded app to.

And my question here is:
How i can achieve this data in external app? How would look like the communication between the shopify embedded app, and my external web app?
I want it to be public app, so it should work like every user can add app to his store, and then log-in on external service to see data about their shop.

I assume there is some type of authentication, but how would it work?
What i have read is that we can access stores in private apps, by getting api secret key and selecting a shop name in the URL, but this is not my solution.

There is no need for any frontend on shopify embedded app. It should work only as a connector to external app, to provide the needed data

Thanks a lot for help, have a nice day

1 Like
2

Hi Belo,

This does sound like a typical use case for a Shopify app/ accessing the Shopify API - similar to how an ERP would be able to access order/ customer data etc. For this, you’d likely create a custom app and enable access scopes for orders, customers etc and when you make calls to the Admin API you’ll be able to query and transfer data to the external app/ platform.