This has come up twice recently and I am missing part of my brain, so looking for a quick heads up on how this works.
Marketplaces exist and they connect to > 1 Shopify store. So a customer on this marketplace, fills their cart with 10 products from Shopify sales channel AAA and then 10 products from Shopify sales channel BBB. Now what?
I get it if all the products in the marketplace are from one Shopify store, we can load up a checkout, send the customer to the Shopify checkout, they pay, and the order is booked by Shopify for the merchant, sale came from the marketplace, fulfillment happens lalala.
But how does this marketplace function when carts are multi-store? I know. Dumb ass question… but it occurs many times.
Funny. I am guessing the lack of replies here speaks to the lack of people in the dev community that ever bother to try the fancier aspects of Shopify? I mean c’mon? Someone must know how Shopify works here. Sales channels cannot be that useless! What is the secret sauce to marketplace people hooking up to Shopify and letting Shopify merchants sell on their marketplace?
Cart permalinks with a cart splitting in to separate checkouts would be the supported method for multi-store marketplace checkout flows.
For a practical example of how to implement this approach, the (now archived) marketplaces buyer app sample code is still available on GitHub: GitHub - Shopify/shopify-marketplaces-buyer-app.
This demonstrates how to handle the multi-store scenario you’re describing, where cart items get distributed to their respective Shopify stores for individual checkout and payment processing.
Thanks for that. So that is clunky in the extreme. What is the alternative? For now, what I see, these marketplaces take the $ using Stripe, giving the customer convenience. Then they parse the orders and distribute them back to the Shopify merchants for fulfillment and book keeping. As for the money, that is then done via separate external payouts between marketplace and Shopify.
So I assume Shopify is A-Ok with that, even though it means customers are not checking out with Shopify. Can you confirm please? I am trying to suss out the reality of Shopify today in this scenario… as I said… it keeps coming up!
Ok. So a marketplace with an App in N merchant stores, can sell one order to one customer with say N-1 line items, do the payment themselves, and then issue N-1 orders to the N-1 Shopify stores, and the N-1 merchants will then have the orders, fulfill the orders, and the marketplace will ensure payments are remitted to the N-1 merchants via side channels of some sort. In fact, the shipping address of the created Shopify orders could be to the customer, but the customer itself could be the marketplace, and the merchants then issue an invoice directly to the marketplace for payment.
I wish there was a proper set of collated case studies on how Shopify is used in these kinds of setups.
Thanks for sharing that scenario to highlight more of what you are seeing.
I think part of what’s contributing to the confusion here is that the checkout API was deprecated, which means a lot of our older marketplace resources and examples were pointing to functionality that’s no longer available. That’s why everything current points towards the cart APIs and permalinks instead.
If you have specific technical questions around some of the things you are seeing, I’m happy to see what I can answer here. At the very least, I’ll make sure this feedback about needing better collated case studies and architectural guidance gets passed along to our product teams, since this would clearly benefit the whole community of developers.
I failed to expose the issue well I suppose. In a nutshell.
I am asked simple question by marketplace. What kind of App do I need to allow Shopify merchants to sell on my marketplace (which is clearly not Shopify and thus, allowed!)
When it comes to checkout on this marketplace, checkout links and/or any checkout that is more than ONE instance of a checkout is, for lack of a better term, stupid, and not gonna happen.
A customer of this marketplace, will do ONE checkout. Not more than one.
SO WHAT IS THE SHOPIFY SOLUTION HERE?
I am waiting 20 years now to hear and so far, nothing ??? nada..???
There has to be a solution other than the ones that are entirely doing what I suggested above! But, if what I suggested is the way, been there, done that, I am fine! But I want to know with certainty.
People tell me StockX is an example that works. I don’t know it, but what is it they do that satisfies my question?
The simplest answer is that this is not typically an option for sales channel apps. From our API terms:
not use an alternative to Shopify Checkout for web checkout or payment processing, or register any transactions through the Shopify API in connection with such activity, without Shopify’s express written authorization;
However, when you’re working with marketplaces looking to integrate, the payment processing request form in your partner dashboard (screenshot I shared earlier) is how you can kick off a conversation with our partnerships team to discuss options further.
I am not unaware of the Shopify legal docs on marketplaces! I have wasted a hundred thousand dollars with those restrictions in place !!
I get it that there is a mysterious channel where payments go to die, and deals are made. OK. Not helpful on the surface, but one day I, at some person’s cost other than mine, I may venture there on their dime, to figure this out.
I was hoping there was a nice pattern available without resorting to smoke and mirrors, but since no one is actually paying me at this time, I will let this issue die here. Thanks for the tips that steered me! Much appreciated.
and so far, nothing ??? nada..???