As anyone who has done any serious web application development using the cloud (in my case Heroku) to host an App supporting Shopify shops, you need to be aware of the API call limits of both the shop itself and across all the shops the App is installed in. The 300|3000 rule – you can call one shop 300 times continuously or make 3000 calls to all shops continuously.

We used to have to write wrapper code to monitor and count API calls on top of writing complex program logic which was clunky to say the least. The ShopifyAPI development team kicked in by providing API call limits in the response headers, allowing an App to smartly self-monitor these limits during processing…

We are all Happy, not!

Scenario. You are running a very busy Shopify business, closing hundreds of orders per day. Your product is great, Shopify works great, and your customers are by an large happy.

Occasionally, no matter how well things are going, a customer is going to phone up and complain about something. The product was not quite what they expected. The delivery was late. The book was bent. The fruit was soft. The neon green was more like neon taupe. And on and on…

I am in the midst of no longer giving away simple (or complex) Apps for free, but instead, hooking into the Shopify Billing system built into the API, so I can receive some lunch money from my hard work.

So, I receive access to a store, as the store admin, deploy my code, and test out the Recurring Charge calls. It all works as expected in my experiments, so I call up the shop keeper and let her push the actual button confirming that yes, she is willing to pay the small monthly fee for using my small App to relieve her of tedious work…

A good many developers probably have installed the shopify_api gem from rubygems.org in order to built an Application to provide new functionality to shops. In fact, without even wanting to develop a full application, this gem is great for quick and dirty manipulation of stores. I am constantly using the Ruby console IRB to check if certain inventory makes sense, or other tidbits. It is almost essential to use this gem to advantage. If you have ever used Textmate on OSX and hooked up the handy Shopify Bundle from Meeech, then you are very used to typing in an API key and password to a domain to edit the assets, theme, etc. Turns out, there is yet another way to interact with shops, and it also involves the command line…

When running a Shopify store, sometimes you want to treat your orders a little different than the normal flow allows. It can really depend on your shipping alliances, your inventory and what your customers expect for communications.

When an order is booked, the customer and shop keeper receive an email that serves as a first communication. There are quite a few other email templates that can be fired off once the initial order is dealt with. Fulfillment seems to present some issues that I have dealt with recently using custom Applications…