Hey Shopify Developers & Community,
I’m currently taking on a project to build a tool that simplifies the process of launching a store on Shopify. Here’s the key points:
- It will be hosted as a standalone web app
- It will be used by children (with their parents) to learn about ecommerce
- It should require very minimal setup (ideally no third party creating an account on Shopify, opening a store, installing my custom app, etc.)
- It will ask questions to generate the name, logo, theme, and products
- It will generate a standalone store with a very simplified admin
- It will function as a store that sells items and provide revenue
- The end goal is to create a simplified version of the Shopify process, so easy “a 5 year old could do it”
So, first off, is this possible with the Shopify platform? I’ve been brainstorming a lot of different approaches and am mainly looking at two:
- The user has to create a Shopify account and install an App that I create, this is not ideal for the extremely easy setup we’re aiming for
- There’s one central store that uses collections/metaobjects/etc. to store each child (no pun intended) store’s data, I like this approach but is there any way to properly track and forward the revenue to the correct child stores?
If at this point, you’re thinking “why are you even using Shopify?!”, let me explain…
My client is a dad and really just wants a very basic MVP. The store is created, there doesn’t need to be a theme editor, products can be purchased, automatically fulfileld, and revenue can be earned or donated to charity. For now, he just wants this simplified as much as possible for his kids. Since the process will be exactly like creating a store on Shopify but majorly simplified so a child can do it I wanted to see if it was possible with this platform’s backend. I have a lot of experience creating custom application and storefronts using Shopify’s various APIs and in my experience it feels like the possibilities are endless… but maybe I’ve finally found the end!
If you have any guidance or knowledge around these topics, I’d be so grateful for your insight!
Thanks a lot,
C.J.
Unless you have an explicit reason why every child needs to be implicitly using shopify in addition to whatever motives you have to use shopify this is just you trying to shopify as a hammer.
This is just a multi-vendor marketplace; or a sales channel but the lite plan is no longer available for that approach to make sense.
Your gonna have a long road to build this out on shopify, there will be constant bugbears like managing payouts.
Roll your own with ecomm stack with stripe, or a whitelabel ecommerce service , etc.
Hook up a google forms/spreadsheet to product creation, or a lowcode service like retool to build a UI.
This is just a custom-admin process like if you wanted staff to only be able to edit product descriptions but can’t give them store access because shopifys permissions are not granular enough to prevent them from editing other product properties once they have the permission to write-products.
Thanks for the reply!
I agree with you for the most part and for sure see where you are coming from. My idea is definitely not what Shopify is specifically designed for, but I wanted to know if it was possible or way too convoluted to make it worthwhile. However, this reply does not really answer any questions or provide insight into what I was asking. While I have developed full e-commerce sites without the use of any headless CMS, that will probably not be an option here. Unfortunately I do not have an unlimited time frame for this project so using an existing platform is really what I am in need of.
I don’t plan on needing to use Shopify’s User Permission system for this, I think I can use metaobjects to create the child stores and assign them an ID that will connect them to that metaobject from the external database I’ll use as a login system for my application. This will handle assigning products, collections, and other metadata. This is ideal if using a single store to host the idea because it will all be manageable externally via Shopify’s Admin API. But, again, this is a pretty hacky way of creating a system like this and I may search elsewhere or end up having to develop my own system. I will edit my post and say that this is truly an MVP, getting something launched as quickly as possible with minimal extra features.
Thanks again, I greatly appreciate the reply!