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Gamification is often a great hook to generate interest in customers. In this case, let’s call it “gambling” 😅, but how about building a theme extension with a scratch and win and in case of success generate a discount code to use within a certain date? I think it’s a cool idea, and you?

The merchant I got inspiration from for this idea sells hand-made ukuleles from several manufacturers. Each uke is unique in appearance by the nature of each wood type, grain, and sound. So, they created a new listing for each uke with photos and descriptions specific to that uke alone. Once that uke is sold, they archive the product.

Since sold ukes are archived immediately, customers don’t have a chance to leave a review. Even if they did, a review on that individual product wouldn’t do any good – even if we were to sell another of the same model – as that new uke would have a new product listing.

They set up Collections by Brand, Size, and Price. 

Why not use metafields to let customers review collections as well in order to have general feedback about a specific product type?

3. Exclusive offers or partnerships' pages 🤝

This post suggested an app to create separate pages to display exclusive offers. The offers on these pages would have unique and exclusive pricing available only for certain partners.

Example: a clothing brand that gives a 10% discount on all t-shirts to all the employees of a partner brand.

 This merchant also mentions that he would like to have these pages non-indexed by Google, so perhaps this could be a condition when creating these deals’ pages.

4. Appointment App Based On Location 🧭

This merchant’s company has several store locations, each with different days/hours of operation. On their “Schedule an Appointment” form, they need to implement a date/time picker that updates to reflect the available days and appointment time slots based on the store location customers select. 

Right now, they have a basic calendar date picker that only shows available days, not time slots, and they cannot set different days/hours of operation for each location.

In my opinion, this sounds like Calend.ly or Cal.com for Shopify, who’s going to build it?

As easy as it sounds. Show stock of each variant next to the variant options radio form or select component in the PDP form, perhaps with a Back in stock link for the options with stock zero.

Hope you enjoyed this issue! Follow me on Twitter for the latest updates about my upcoming app Flash Promos, and more. 🚀

5 hot tips for Shopify Apps in August

 there are so many ideas floating around App devs’ minds. Here are some ideas I collected from merchants this month.

It is definitely a great time to be part of the Shopify Ecosystem, the updates that were published last week are absolutely insane, so many that I need some scheduled time to go through all of them.

For me, one of the most interesting ones was definitely Shopify Functions, I have been developing Shopify stores for the last few years and every time some automation logic was needed, I had to copy-paste Ruby code (I don’t know Ruby at all) in Shopify Scripts Editor. 

Now we can finally write tailored logic and deploy it without that.

I see this as a first step to making Shopify more open and customizable, but still with a reassuring control of the platform by the company. I am a fan of strict rules in a platform because without it you end up in a WordPress-like hell, where anarchy reigns and long-term maintainability literally goes out of the window. 

No offense to WP devs, this is just my opinion.

So what I personally think is that Shopify has started to open the platform yet maintaining control, which is the perfect balance.

So excited and curious to see what will be built! Now, let’s start with our meaningful feedback!

#1 Automated Related Products By Metafield 🤖

An app that might let you Limit related product suggestions based on:

Products with two or three metafields matching certain criteria based on the product being viewed

Each product should have a unique set of related products that can be calculated based on rules such as above, identical combinations of metafield entries such as “Model = X” and “Colour Set = Y”, and “Group = Z”, these are not fields visible by a customer in the front end, they just help dictate related products.

One rule might be related items are the same model and Colour Set for example, and it’s in stock. Another rule might be it’s the same Colour and Group but ignores the model.

In this case, the Merchant seems to have found an app that does the trick using tags, props to 

, however, how would you go about building a sort of an engine using metafields?

When a user buys some products, they will get an email with an affiliate link to the shop every time someone visits the shop through the affiliate link the user will get 1% of the money spent to his account to spend in the shop.

This sort of kickback-fee process could really be powerful via email but also why not extend this with a cookie/popup combination at the next visit (in addition to an email)?

This free affiliate marketing motivates customers to be the merchant’s promoters.

#3 Sync multiple FBA Amazon shops to 1 Shopify store ⚙️

An app that would allow us to sync multiple FBA shops’ inventory to one single Shopify store. Provided that all SKUs are unique across all FBA accounts so data conflicts should generally not be an issue, but perhaps this app should also consider a sort of duplicate SKU check when syncing in order not to have conflicts.

The example here is a ticketed event on Shopify with different tiers/variants. The problem to solve is: to share inventory quantities in order not to oversell the event. 

#5 Customer Discount For Texting A Friend 📲

Post purchase extension to send an SMS to a friend, a sort of rapid affiliate marketing right after purchase in order to receive future discounts or discount codes once the message is sent to a friend for both the customer and their friends.

A Sales Pop-up App that allows merchants to schedule multiple concurring or sequentially scheduled pop-ups so that this doesn’t have to be done manually.

For example, a Daily Deal pop-up appears when a customer lands on any page. Each day merchants can promote a different item or combination of items in conjunction with a countdown clock in the pop-up, all this set up in advance only at certain times of the day.

#7 “You Bought This Before” Popup/Widget 🔔

An app that lets customers know they have purchased an item before on the product page or in the shopping cart, like on Amazon.

#8 IRL Customer Reviews Using QR Code ⭐️

Getting customer reviews for the products they are buying with a QR Code on a thank you card shipped along with the products. 

The problem here is that for different products that customers are buying, there need to be different QR Codes so that by scanning them, customers land on the single product pages they have purchased.

I hope this feedback helps you get inspired along with all the fantastic updates from Shopify Editions.

If you found this valuable, consider sharing this newsletter with anyone who may find it interesting, and follow me on 

Inspiration app ideas for July

Building meaningful Shopify Apps (BMSA) is a newsletter that aims to reduce the gap between merchants and app developers, to make the ecosystem stronger than ever!

Just a reminder, BMSA is a newsletter created by me but based on the feedback I get on multiple channels and forums, or by having conversations with merchants and agencies. Now, let’s get to the main course 😊.

Idea #1: Pickup or delivery scheduling 📦🗓

An app that gives customers the power to choose a time slot within a range of options for both pickup and delivery.

After checkout, perhaps using a post-purchase extension, using a structure similar to Calendly, that lets a customer book or choose a time that suits them.

This could definitely need some sort of integration with the shipping providers (at least for delivery), hence I see this kind of app is very suitable for builders that are already in the shipping/ fulfillment arena.

Idea #2: Multi-provider invoicing integration

A reliable app that integrates with different invoicing providers that automates all the manual work currently done by many merchants to keep their books tidy.

This may be niched down by country specifically for the differences in taxation and bureaucracy, but the point is: making taxes EASY.

An app that controls the availability dates of a product.e.g. The product is available from Jan 1st to Jan 15th. There are some apps like Launchpad that are only for Plus merchants and do not allow overlapping launches. Also, Shopify flow can do something like that but only for the advanced and not the basic plan.

The big win here is to take this market slice of basic plan merchants and help them scale their brands with an app like this.

I am aware personally that the Admin API for shops on the basic plan does not allow the product to be published on channels programmatically, as the mutation 

 requires the write_publications access scope, 

which is currently available only to private apps installed on Shopify Plus stores

So the challenge here is, how can we build this? Go crazy on this one ⚡️

That’s all for this issue, thanks for reading!

I am working hard to collect as much feedback as I can for next month and collecting already a lot of interesting and juicy feedback, 

 and feel free to reach out, my DMs are open.

Also, it would be great if you shared my newsletter with other developers or founders 😊 The more developers/founders know about this, the merrier merchants will be.

 4 juicy tips, and ideas for June

Last month I quit my job to focus on freelancing and building Shopify Apps, to help merchants and brands simplify their processes and focus on their growth.

My goal is to build and help other devs/founders build "Meaningful" apps.

A "Meaningful" app for me means that it solves a very specific pain/struggle for a merchant. I have worked in this ecosystem for a while and lots of merchants have these struggles on a daily basis. My goal is to intercept these struggles.

Dedicating part of my time to regularly interacting with merchants on Socials, Forums, and DMs and distilling all this feedback in a monthly newsletter for Shopify App Devs and anyone who's interested in improving the ecosystem.

I strongly believe that sharing and making the ecosystem stronger and more connected is a win-win approach for everyone and therefore I have decided, in my small, to help reduce the gap between developers and merchants.

I will finish building in public and launch my first Shopify app: Flash Promos (and hopefully other future apps).

Flash Promos aims to help manage and schedule price changes and discounts easily and blazing fast. 
And launch "Building Meaningful Shopify Apps" ⬇

From the 1st of June, every 1st of the month I will deliver this feedback directly to your inbox.

Let's make this ecosystem stronger than ever. 💪🏻

Jonathan Giardino

Chief side-projects officer and React fanboy.

Writing

5 hot tips for Shopify Apps in August

Inspiration app ideas for July

4 juicy tips, and ideas for June

Building Meaningful Shopify Apps

Latest work

cURL

Flash Promos (sold)

Building meaningful Shopify Apps