The Shopify API is pretty good but gets me confused sometimes.
I’m developing a cart replacement to the current checkout process in Shopify with some custom options.
Like sharing a cart with friends ETC.
So I have a few questions which I do not really understand from the API documentation.
I do understand that if I take the cart and checkout process outside of the store, The API states that my app needs to be a channel to be able to integrate with Sales API. Is that really necessary?
Although I’m not some public social or a sales network like Ebay or similar to that.
So just a question do I really have to convert my app into a sales channel? or I can somehow pass on that and integrate it as a public app?
Thanks
Hi @Alex000 ,
If you are looking to customize the checkout process and take it off of Shopify, then yes you need to make a Sales Channels and then request for the Checkout API (and Shopify will have to approve you first before you can process payments in the checkout). The only other option would be to look into using the Hosted Payment SDK to integrate an external payment gateway with Shopify, but this also requires approval form Shopify first (https://shopify.dev/docs/hosted-payment-sdk).
If you are only looking at modifying the cart process, you can look into leveraging the Ajax Cart API: https://shopify.dev/tutorials/develop-theme-getting-started-using-ajax-api. This will help you retrieve and modify a customers cart on the Shopify store.
Hi @hassain
Thank you for your reply.
Well I do want to take the checkout process outside of the store but still to use Shopify payment to simplify the process.
I had a meeting with Spreedly a couple of days ago on this topic as I thought to take the tokenizing payment process to them and then submit with Shopify for payment finalizing.
By the way in case of the client not using Shopify as his payment gateway, will this still be possible?
Or I will need to integrate with whatever third party application he’s using?
Also if so, is there a way for me to fetch what gateway the store owner is using for adding support to it?
Also as much as I understand that if the checkout wasn’t created by me (programmatically), I wouldn’t be able to view it later…
The idea is that I will be able to show “advertizing” of the same product to new customers of purchase numbers of the same product and what else those checkouts had like having similar products etc…
Cause If I can get those checkout records I can’t pass on the entire payment process.
Thank you for any type of information.
Thank you
Hi @Alex000 ,
With regards to Spreedly and tokenizing the payment process, there is a way to use the Shopify Storefront API and create + complete a custom checkout using Spreedly to send customer credit card information to Shopify’s PCI compliant card vault. Read documentation here for this: https://shopify.dev/tutorials/create-a-checkout-with-storefront-api#spreedly. However, once again this requires approval from Shopify for your sales channel to be able handle payment processing in the Checkout.
Regarding your second question about not being able to access checkouts you did not create - while that is true, keep in mind that once a checkout completes it becomes an order. So if you make an App that has access to the read_all_orders scope in the Admin API, you can get the history of all completed orders from that shop and use that data to do product recommendations
Thank you @hassain for your time and effort…