Hello there,
I have an embedded app for shopify admin. I need a webpage where the customer can click on a shopify product.
Somehow I am missing the idea of how to create a webpage which I can access by for example: myshopifyshop.de/special_shop. This webpage should run in my embedded rails app, can call routes and controllers / models.
Can you give me some hints what I should search for, my brain is kinda stuck.
Thanks in advance!
Torsten
Hi @Pichutan
Good question - so the embedded app is only present in the Shopify admin, accessible by the merchant.
If you need customer facing functionality - there are many different options to help facilitate that.
There’s a Pages API, Online Store script tag registration, App Blocks for themes and more.
So it kind of depends on how plug and play you want to be, vs how much customization the merchant can do.
If you want to just create a static page for the merchant from a simple action in your embedded app, then the Pages API might be a good start. But blocks are more customizable and can be dragged and dropped onto the theme.
Hey Dylan!
Thanks for your fast answer!
I only need some kind of static page, which fetches products from shopify and display it in a special way.
It seems like I can use the Pages API for it. But I am not sure if I got it 100%. Can the app still be embedded (I understand it only runs in admin) or do I need to change it? An if I create a Page with the API, can this page communicate with my embedded webapp?
On the other hand, if I want the a page accessible by the customer, it cannot be an Shopify app, it does not matter if its not embedded at that point right?
So is there a possibilty to have a rails webapp running, which can access my shopify products but can be also accessed by customers, because I need some Javascript which needs to make a GraphQL call to the shopify backend and then create an order in shopify.
Maybe I also just need a way to fetch products and placing orders from a external website, but this also looks difficult.
Hi @Pichutan
You’ll still need to publish an app to access the merchant’s inventory over the Admin API.
An new apps have an embedded requirement for publishing.
An app can use multiple APIs and publshing types, such as the Pages API, app embed blocks, checkout extensions and more. However the merchant needs an admin area in their dashboard, which is why you’ll at least need the embedded app part.
Your app may rely on exposing a public API to fetch specific inventory from the customer’s perspective on the public facing site. But there may be other Storefront APIs provided by Shopify that give this information without the need of the Admin API.
I highly recommend reading about all of the possible APIs and system for publishing code on the merchant’s frontend before deciding the best path forward.